


Her Best Men

by Lassenby



Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fluff, OT3, Pregnancy, polyship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-03-14 16:44:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 29,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3418076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassenby/pseuds/Lassenby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilith answers her own question: Is it worth it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Labor of Love

“Shit-licking, cock-swilling, skag fucker!” Lilith swore, as cramps gripped her insides with unforgiving fingers.

Laughter answered her outburst on both sides: Brick's rumble from the left, Mordecai's chuckle from the right. Lilith fixed her glare on the latter. He swallowed and fell silent, but she still flicked a pinch of embers into his beard. This was his fault. His and Brick's, who grabbed her other hand, as much to restrain as to comfort her. Flames licked over his knuckles, but he held on tight. She squeezed back as fresh pain threatened to tear her in half.

She thought about thunder sheets: those flat, metal pieces that you strike with a hammer to make the sound of thunder. This felt like that, except that these vibrations made no sound, only sent silent strikes of lightning up her spine. She tried to count between contractions. Count the seconds to find out how many miles away the storm was. Right? Something like that?

“Fucking...fuck!” _One. Two. Three..._

The storm must have been heading the other way, because the pain slowly diminished, leaving Lilith to catch her breath. Sweat had popped out on her forehead, and Brick wiped it away with the heel of his palm.

Her siren abilities filled the room with a haze of heat. Under the bright clinic lights, Brick's skin appeared sallow and clammy, his eyes sunken. Mordecai looked just as bad, patting his beard to tamp out the remaining embers. In the moment, Lilith barely recognized them.

“This fucking sucks,” she sobbed. “Didn't Zed tell you to distract me, or something?”

“I don't know how,” Mordecai said.

“Tell me why I shouldn't kill you when this is over. Remind me why it's worth it,” she ordered, then twisted as a warning cramp lanced through her groin. Mordecai slipped his fingers into hers. He squeezed despite the unnatural heat radiating from her skin. Later, he would have blisters.

“You're gonna be a momma,” Brick reminded.

“And you love us,” Mordecai added, a note of hope in his voice. “You'll want us around to help raise the kid.”

“Do I? Will I?” The answer was quick to come: She did. Even now, with them looking so ghastly and unfamiliar, and their baby tearing her apart at the seams, she loved them. “Okay, yeah. Assholes.”

If they wouldn't distract her, she would distract herself. She laid back in bed, holding the hands of both men, and remembered how they'd gotten her into this mess.


	2. Rest

 

Lilith swooned awake. For a moment, her bleary mind confused dream with reality. She'd been dreaming about Roland coming back to bed, finally, with cool hands and chilly kisses. _What took you so long,_ she'd asked, resting her arms over his shoulders. _You were gone forever._

When he didn't answer, she tried again. “Babe? Where were you?”

“Lil?” The voice wasn't Roland's. Lilith's eyes snapped open.

The room was dark, but she could just make out the gauzy outlines of Mordecai's face by the moonlight from the window. He regarded her with concern in one eye and a glare in the other. That eye always seemed to glare. A starburst of white washed out the green, so the pupil floated in a faint, ghostly iris. Even though Lilith had seen the eye before, it startled her.

“M-Mordecai,” she stammered.

“Switch with me,” he said.

She nodded, though she still didn't remember where she was or how she'd gotten there. She shifted to allow Mordecai to scramble over her, and immediately she rolled into Brick's divot. Everything came back to her.

Brick had found her struggling through heaps of paperwork the night before. She hadn't slept for two days straight, hadn't been back to her apartment in a week. She'd never realized how much paperwork the Raiders generated. Roland had always handled that stuff.

At the sight of her baggy eyes and sallow complexion, Brick had insisted that she forget about the reports for the night. He'd tossed the struggling commander over his shoulder and hauled her back to his apartment, where he'd dumped her on bed, pinned her with one meaty arm, and ordered her to get some damn sleep.

Mordecai had stumbled in later, swearing and tripping over things in the dark. _Perro malo,_ he'd scolded Brick after discovering the exhausted siren in their bed. _What'd I tell you about bringing home dead things? Seriously, Lil, you look awful._

Now Lilith found herself smooshed against Brick, helpless to escape his orbit. He wrapped an arm around her, squeezing hard enough to woof the breath out of her. With his hard body pressed against her back, Lilith realized, a blush blooming across her cheeks, that some parts were harder than others.

“No trade-backs,” Mordecai mumbled into a pillow.

“How can you sleep with this meatbag every night?” Lilith asked, trying to wriggle—unsuccessfully—out of his grip.

“I don't,” Mordecai replied. He lifted his face away from the pillow just enough to flash her the sharp, white eyetooth of a grin. “You're sleeping with the meatbag tonight. And don't call him a meatbag. That's my boyfriend you're talking about.”

“Then _you_ should be the one getting poked by this thing, not me,” she snapped.

Mordecai only laughed. Lilith's second attempt to squirm out of Brick's grip was thwarted by a tighter embrace and snuggle. She felt suffocated under his considerable bulk. He breathed hotly against the nape of her neck, and the poking device in question ground more firmly against her rear. She cleared her throat. “Geez. Don't you care that your man is humping me?”

“Nope,” Mordecai said, rolling over to face the wall. His undershirt rode up, revealing the smooth, brown slope of his spine, the skin flecked with lighter scars. His dreads lay in a loose tangle across the pillow. “He humps me all the time. I'm taking the night off.”

Lilith scowled. “I'm gonna grind back on him,” she threatened.

“Go ahead. Enjoy. He's a surprisingly gentle lay.”

“What! What if I actually do it?”

Mordecai didn't reply. After a moment, a soft snore rose from his direction. If he'd been dealing with this all night, Lilith couldn't blame him for passing out. Unlike Mordecai's shallow, even breathing, Brick snored like a foghorn into her ear. She sighed and shut her eyes and tried to sleep in spite of the noise. The hardness pressed between them was even harder to ignore, but eventually she passed into an uneasy doze.

Until Brick's hand drifted up to squarely cup her breast. Lilith jumped like a cat.

“Hey!” she yowled. Brick's hand didn't fall away until she pressed a smear of embers against his knuckles. Even then, his snoring hitched and he drew his hand protectively back to his side, but the pain didn't rouse him from sleep. Lilith perched against the wall, sitting on Mordecai's feet as Brick's snoring resumed.

“Wake up,” she demanded, shaking the sniper's thin shoulder.

“Not tonight,” he slurred, swatting absently in her direction. “In the morning. I'll get you...” he paused as a yawn swelled through the sentence. “...in the morning.”

“I'm not your horny boyfriend,” Lilith said. “Wake up and switch me back, or I'm going home.”

Mordecai yawned again and struggled into a sitting position. The sheets pooled around his waist, and he blinked at Lilith for a long, bleary moment, not quite seeing her. He smacked his chapped lips. “Right. I got a better idea.”

“A better idea? You couldn't have done that before?”

Mordecai pressed himself back against the wall so he sat beside Lilith. He planted his feet against Brick's chest. “Okay, you get his legs.”

“His legs...?”

“We kick on three.”

Lilith laughed. She obediently pressed her bare feet against Brick thighs. He'd untangled himself from the sheets sometime in the night, and he looked almost cute, hugging a pillow instead of his bedmates, his tanktop and boxers askew on his massive frame. _Tough tits_ , she thought, and gave a testing flex of her calves.

“Not yet. One..two...three!”

They kicked out together. With all their combined strength, Lilith still wasn't sure they'd be able to budge the brute. Then Brick rolled slowly backward and over the edge of the mattress, vanishing from view. He hit the floor with the thump.

An extra loud snore snarled through his nose, followed by silence...then another snore, this one deep, even, and mercifully far from Lilith's ear.

“Yes!” she whispered, and raised a closed fist.

Mordecai's knuckles tapped hers in a silent, triumphant bump. Their eyes met, and a peculiar flutter filled her belly. For once, that empty eye didn't seem to glare, but to gleam, drawing her in with its striking gaze. The smile slipped from her lips.

“What's wrong?” he whispered.

“Nothing,” Lilith said, forcing the smile back. “Just tired.”

“Lay down, then,” Mordecai said. He didn't wait, but flopped backward himself, pulling her down beside him. They came to rest in the valley Brick had left behind, their limbs tangled around each other. Lilith swallowed. That flutter was back and doubled, a tickle like a flock of birds circling. Mordecai's grin lingered, and she found herself alarmingly close to that crooked smile, that one sharp, white eyetooth. A stray thought crossed her mind; she wondered what it would be like to kiss him. Would that sharp tooth graze her lip?

A shiver wrung her top to bottom, and she buried her face into the crook of Mordecai's neck to take her eyes off his lips.

“'night, Lil,” he murmured, his voice hushed and husky, and Lilith hoped her grunt of acknowledgment didn't sound as strange as she felt.

She could feel Mordecai's pulse thrumming against her flushed cheek. It might have been her imagination, but it seemed quick. His breathing didn't turn regular for a long stretch of minutes. When it finally did, she remained wakeful for awhile after that, listening to his easy exhalations and Brick's labored snores. Her friends, her best friends: the ones who'd survived.

The loss of Roland had driven the three of them closer together, as though to fill in the gap he'd left behind. But she'd never been as physically close to them as this, with Brick spooning her earlier, and Mordecai's heart bumping against hers now. She liked it. That regular beat, beat, beat eventually lulled her into sleep.

In a dream, she found herself back in Brick's arms. The feeling sparked by Mordecai's gaze still burned in her belly. An ache throbbed between her legs. When Brick pressed against her this time, she pressed back and reached down between them, pushed down his boxers, twitched her panties aside, and welcomed him in. It wasn't real, but it felt real enough. Real enough that she came, shivering and sighing, in Mordecai's unconscious embrace.


	3. Unguarded

A string of expletives led Lilith out of sleep. She opened her eyes to find herself staring at Mordecai. The scowling, half-dressed man stood by the bedside, his hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail. He glared at something on the ground.

“ _Caquita_ ,” he hissed. “Get up! I'm tired of tripping over your dumb ass.”

A pale, confused moon rose over the side of the bed. Brick looked around, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

“Huh? Did I fall off the bed again?”

Mordecai caught Lilith's gaze and shot her a wink before snapping his goggles down over his eyes, hiding them behind opaque lenses. “Yep.”

“Damn. I gotta stop doin that,” Brick muttered.

He climbed back into bed, and Lilith rolled helplessly into his indent. She glanced at the window, trying to guess the time. The long day and night cycles on Pandora made it difficult, but Brick had carried her back to the apartment during full night, and the sky she glimpsed through the slatted blinds looked the same as it had then: thick with stars, the void deepened by their shine.

“You're leaving?” she asked Mordecai, who was securing his long, red scarf around his waist.

“Yeah. Gotta meet a weapons dealer. He's only planetside for today, so I have to catch him. Hey, if it's any consolation, you can use the shower when you get up. We've got hot water."

“Hot water? No shit!” Suddenly full of energy, Lilith struggled out of the tangle of blankets. “My place doesn't even have hot water.”

Mordecai bent to plant a peck on Brick's cheek, but the larger man caught him and dragged him in for a more thorough kiss. Upon release, Mordecai stumbled back. He cleared his throat. “You can use ours anytime. Hell, if you want, you can stay here for awhile. I know your apartment is a wreck right now.”

Lilith was grateful for his excuse, though both of them knew there was nothing wrong with her apartment. Nothing besides its emptiness: that the lights were invariably off when she cracked open the door, that no-one ever called from the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom to welcome her home. That was reason enough to dread the place.

“That's awesome, thanks. I'll just sleep on the couch next time.”

“No way,” Mordecai said. “It was nice to sleep next to someone with boobs again. No offense, _mi rey._ Your pecs are tight, but they're not the same as...you know.”

He raised his hands in front of him, to open and close his fingers in a squeezing motion. Brick's features darkened, deepening into a scowl, and he flipped Mordecai a middle finger. The sniper only laughed and swung out of the doorway, calling goodbyes behind him. The front door slammed shut before Lilith could call back.

“ _Mi rey?_ ” she asked Brick. “What's that mean?”

Brick hesitated. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but Lilith thought she saw his cheeks color. “My king,” he said, finally.

She couldn't help it; A delighted laugh escaped her lips. “You guys are sickeningly cute.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ain't you gonna take a shower?”

Wholeheartedly, yes. Lilith clambered across Brick's frame and stumbled to her feet, nearly turning her ankle on an empty beer bottle in the dark. The floor was a minefield of gun parts, garbage, and heaps of clothing.

Inside the bathroom, she flipped a switch on the wall and squinted in the sudden brightness. When her eyes adjusted, she cringed. Dirty grout striped the tile floor. The toilet seat stood open, revealing a bowl ringed with grime. Lilith lowered the lid. The shower was standing space only, separated from the rest of the bathroom by a textured plastic pane. Mildew crept up the inside, although she wouldn't have been deterred even if she'd discovered a pack of skags sleeping in there. The chance for a hot shower was too good to pass up.

She shed her clothes and thought about setting the bundle in the sink, but a clog had filled the basin with a half inch of standing water. Instead, she kicked the bundle against the baseboard and stepped into the shower. She pressed the control panel to select medium warmth, medium pressure, then jumped back as an icy deluge sputtered from the nozzle.

“Oh,” Brick called. “It's broke. You gotta make it extra hot if you want warm.”

“Could have told me before,” she said, shivering, chilled by the fine mist of freezing drops that billowed off the floor. She adjusted the settings with shaking fingers. Hot temp, low pressure. The spray stuttered, then began to heat up. Lilith stepped into the welcoming warmth.

Her muscles relaxed, little by little, as the hot water sloughed away the past few day's worth of sweat and tension. The steam filled her mind as much as the bathroom, clearing her thoughts, making her concerns distant behind a thick wall of white. She didn't pick up the sliver of soap until the hot water began to run out. She hurried to lather up her skin before the warmth drained away completely, rinsed off, and pressed the panel to turn off the spray. Dripping onto the mildewy floor of the shower, she realized that she'd forgotten to grab a towel.

“Brick?”

A sleepy grunt came from the bedroom. After a moment, Brick yelled back. “What?”

“Can you bring me a towel?”

Another grumble and some muffled stomping later, the bathroom door banged open. Lilith remained in the shower, and Brick looked like a painting through the bumpy plastic pane: blotches of color, like blobs of paint. He tossed a towel over the top of the shower wall, and Lilith caught it.

“This is dirty,” she said, grimacing at the towel's unpleasant crunchiness.

“That's all we got.” The colored splotches shifted as Brick turned to leave, then stopped. “Cute panties,” he said.

“Are you _seriously_ looking at my panties?”

“Sorry. I ain't trying be a creep. 's just, uh...there's really no good place to buy that stuff around here, y'know? On Pandora. And I was wonderin...”

“I order them over the ECHOnet,” Lilith said, patting herself dry with the less crunchy parts of the towel. She paused. “Why?”

Brick didn't answer, but wandered out of the bathroom, leaving the door open behind him. She couldn't blame him for noticing her underwear. She'd worn her date night set—skimpy panties and a push-up bra that actually matched, both trimmed with lace—because she hadn't washed her laundry in over a week. These had been the last clean underwear in the drawer.

She wondered why Brick had wanted to know where she'd bought them, but she had a hunch.

“Green would look good on him,” she called through the open bedroom door.

“Huh?”

“Or red, like mine. But he can't borrow these. He'd stretch out the bottoms.” When Brick didn't answer, she continued. “The panties. You want them for Mordecai, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “For Mordy.”

He clearly wasn't comfortable chatting about it, so Lilith finished drying off in silence and sidled out of the shower. She stepped into her panties and pulled them up to her hips, lamenting that she hadn't brought a change of clothes. The bra, she shrugged on and fastened the hooks, but the rest, she couldn't bring herself to put back on, not yet- Not when she'd just gotten clean.

When she stepped back into the dark bedroom, Brick had flopped back into bed. He lay facing the wall. The steam hadn't reached here, and the chill air raised ripples of gooseflesh across Lilith's bare skin, especially where her still wet hair dripped down her neck.

“Wanna see a cool trick?” she asked.

Brick rolled over to face her. When he saw her standing in just her underwear, his brows shot up. “Uh. What kinda trick?”

She scoffed and flapped her hand dismissive. "It's nothing bad. Watch.”

She rested both hands on her head and threaded her fingers through clumps of sopping hair. She closed her eyes, concentrated, and presently her palms itched. Her scalp grew warm. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it over and over to one side. Soon, her hair was dry and set in her signature sweep.

“Ta-da,” she announced.

“Whoah!”

“I burned the shit out of my hair the first few times I tried it.” A dozen times, at least. She'd walked around with singed tips for the better part of the year before she mastered the trick.

“Wow, Lil. That's amazin,” Brick said, with genuine admiration in his voice.

He'd sat up during her demonstration, and he leaned forward with his hands planted on his knees. In his rumpled undershirt and boxers, his features softened by childlike wonder, he looked different than usual, strangely vulnerable. Lilith remembered that he'd looked the same way last night. He'd hugged his pillow and snored like a truck, oblivious to his scheming bedmates.

That memory knocked loose another one. Those same huge hands, gripping her hips instead of his knees, pulling her back against their owner. Her own hands reaching down to fumble aside clothes, hers and his, to free their naked skin, and to invite him in...not a memory, but a dream. It had to be a dream, right? But it had felt so real. Lilith had dreamed about sex before, but those had always been insubstantial phantoms, full of faceless suitors and acts she couldn't recall in detail when she woke up.

Last night's dream had been nothing like that. She could still feel Brick's hands on her skin, could hear his breathing in her ear. She remembered the pain as he'd slipped into her- just for an instant. The rest had been heat and friction and pleasure. As Mordecai had promised, Brick was a surprisingly gentle lay. Just a dream. A vivid dream, strengthened by the very real, very recent memory of Brick with his arm around her, grinding a sleepy boner into her backside, but still just a dream: one that that had felt real enough to make her come.

Oh God, had she...? In Mordecai's arms? She felt certain the answer was yes, and that quickened the blush across her cheeks even more than the memory of the dream.

“You goin into work, or are you gonna take the day off?” Brick asked.

Lilith blinked. “I'm, uh...I really should go.” Even though her siren trick had warmed the bedroom, her nipples were hard as bullets beneath her bra, and her skin remained bunched by gooseflesh. She had to get out of here, to escape into the snow and stacks of paperwork she'd left back at the HQ.

“I know where Mordy stashes his booze. He won't notice if we dip in,” Brick said. He looked so eager, Lilith couldn't help but consider it.

“It's morning, though?”

“Or maybe it's the middle of the night,” he said, jutting his chin toward the darkness outside the window. “Perfect time for drinkin. Come on, blow off work. You ain't had a break since...” He trailed off.

Since Jack murdered Roland, since they'd killed him in turn. Over two months ago, but the remaining Hyperion forces were still making trouble for the free people of Pandora, the bandit raids had only become more frequent, and now she had to handle everything alone. Now she didn't have Roland to share the load.

“One drink couldn't hurt.”

One drink turned into shots of rakk ale, one after the other, until Lilith's head began to loosen. After four shots each, Brick confessed that he hadn't asked about the panties for Mordecai, but for himself.

“Kinda for Mordecai, though,” he said, hunched over the kitchen table, scratching the scabby paint with one fingernail. “You heard what he said. He misses ladies. I can't be a lady.”

“And you figure that if you wear ladies underwear, that might be enough,” Lilith guessed, and slammed back another shot. “Hey. It couldn't hurt.”

“You think?” Brick's gaze had been fixed downward, but now he looked up hopefully.

“Sure. Little black g-string, maybe one that's all lace that you can see through...” Her fingers drummed thoughtfully against the table. “Good luck finding a bra in your size. Maybe stockings, though.” She could see it, really. It looked better than she would have imagined before five shots of rakk ale.

“That don't seem desperate?”

“Nah. I don't think it'll stop him wanting women, but it  _will_ remind him why he's into guys. If you could see how I'm picturing it, it doesn't leave much to the imagination.”

An hour and a bottle of firemelon vodka later, they'd decided it would be fun to try on each other's underwear. Lilith had to keep hitching up Brick's boxers. The waistline could have comfortably fit around two women her size, and the undershirt strap kept slipping down to the crook of her arm, revealing the slope of one pale breast and the blue coils of her siren marks.

As she'd predicted, Brick couldn't fit into her bra at all. Even the furthest hooks wouldn't reach. He fit into the panties, though, but barely. That prediction had also been correct; they didn't leave anything to the imagination. Lilith had owned that pair for over a year and never noticed that the material was slightly transparent.

“I'm gonna need a bigger size,” Brick said, standing in front of the floor length mirror in the bedroom. He plucked at the panties. No matter how he adjusted them, one side kept crawling up his ass. Lilith sat on the bed behind him, watching the spectacle with a smirk.

“No shit.”

“Hey! You donno what size I wear.”

“True, but I'm guessing it's not the same as mine. I'm swimming over here.”

Brick's eyes met hers in the mirror. “Yeah? I look that good, huh?”

Lilith was horrified to see her reflection blush, her cheeks turning nearly the same red shade as her hair. “That's not...! I meant that I'm swimming in your boxers. They're huge.”

A chuckle like boulders rolling down a mountainside was Brick's only response to her embarrassment.

A flask of bladeflower schnapps later—which tasted as toxic as anything Lilith had ever drunk—the two friends stretched out on the bed, passing the flask back and forth. Neither of them had changed out of their traded underwear. They lay so close that their shoulders pressed together, and Lilith tried not to look down at the alarmingly clear outline of Brick's junk through the panties. Her earlier blush had never fully gone away. All of her skin felt hot to the touch, and she hoped that Brick wouldn't notice.

“I dreamed about you last night,” he said.

Lilith's heart stuttered. She remembered her own dream, and wondered if that had somehow been a shared fantasy. Or had they really done it, and only thought they'd dreamed it? She swallowed hard. “About me?”

“Yeah. It was crazy. You were this half-spiderant, half-lady creature, and you were the queen of all these other spiderants. You didn't remember us, so you kept sendin drones to wipe us out. It was scary, too, 'cos nobody could get to you, with all the spitters and soldiers rollin all over the place, and when we finally did get through, we couldn't get the killing shot. Your butt was too tiny.”

Of course it wasn't the same dream. Still, they were so different that it shocked Lilith into a bark of laughter. Brick chuckled, too, and that avalanche knocked something loose in her, and they both laughed until they were out of breath, even though the dream hadn't been particularly funny. Relief and inebriation relaxed Lilith into a jelly-like sprawl of nearly naked limbs.

“I had a dream about you, too,” she said, before common sense could stop her.

“No way! Was it the same thing?”

“What? How could...” But she'd thought the same thing just a minute ago, so she bit her tongue. “Nah. Nothing like that. Actually...come here. I don't want to say it out loud.”

She wiggled closer and he wiggled closer, and she turned to whisper the dream into the shell of his ear. With her lips so close to his skin, she could feel a blush warm his cheeks while she talked, and feel his pulse quicken against her loose curl of fingers.

He didn't say anything for awhile after she pulled away. Nerves cramped her own throat shut, so for an agonizingly long, sobering moment, they stared at each other in silence. In the years she'd known him, Lilith had found it easy to read Brick's expressions. He was so guileless, so unguarded. But now she found herself unable to tell what thoughts played behind those iron blue eyes. She couldn't even guess.

Until, after one last swallow of awful bladeflower schnapps, he shifted closer and kissed her.


	4. Phase

Lilith whooped as Axton's turret locked onto the sprinting, screaming horde of Bloodshot psychos, gave a thunk, and chugged to life. Its chrome barrel kicked, and the first psycho splatted against the road. A few more staccato bursts had the rest of the psychos on the ground, wounded or dead. Lilith stood over one whose leg had been snapped off at the knee by a high caliber round. She squeezed a burst of SMG fire into its skull, silencing its screams.

While she was distracted by the spectacle of the turret in action, another truckload of bandits pulled up on the other side of the caravan. Their Technical swung around hard and squealed to a stop, sending up a spray of snow. A half dozen bandits vaulted over the side.

“I'll get them,” Lilith yelled to Axton.

Before she could hear his reply, she slipped into phasewalk. In that other dimension, so close to their own that she could see it through a wobbling purple membrane, she jogged around the caravan to head off the bandits. They pointed their assault rifles toward Axton's turret, having not spotted her.

Lilith exploded back into reality in a hail of fire. Flames rained down on the bandits before they could to fan out, and they rolled into the snow on all sides, trying to extinguish their smoldering clothes. Lilith took advantage of their panic. Maliwan sub-machine guns hummed in both hands, and she raised them toward each bandit in turn, exterminating them with a short burst from either the Hellfire or the Tsunami.

When all that remained of the Bloodshots were the smoking, bubbling bodies melting their own graves into the snow, Axton reached under his turret to flick a switch. The device thunk-thunk-thunked back into its compressed form. Lilith greeted the commando with a high five.

“If you don't mind me saying, ma'am, that was poetry. You were a goddess,” he said, hefting the inactive turret back into its pouch.

“I know. And don't call me me ma'am. It makes me feel old.” Actually, Lilith hadn't felt so young in awhile. Immediately after Brick had kissed her, she'd received an ECHO transmission from a supply caravan just outside Sanctuary. They'd been attacked and needed Raiders to fend off the Bloodshot ambush. Lilith had struggled into her clothes and hurried out, where the snow had sobered her somewhat. Axton had responded to the same call, and together they'd made short work of the marauders: Short, joyful, bloody work, the part of the job she still loved.

“How could you feel old?” Axton asked, his brow furrowed in a exaggerated frown of confusion. “What are you? Twenty-five, twenty-six?”

Lilith shook her head and started back to where she'd left her truck. “Flattery won't...uh.” Her gaze settled on the flaming, twisted wreck that had, just a few minutes ago, been their truck. “...Shit.”

So they rode back with the supplies, instead, perched on a heap of boxes in the truckbed of the last vehicle in the caravan. While they watched the bloody battlefield recede, a psycho lab rat from a nearby encampment smelled the carnage and came to investigate. It sniffed around, turned to face down the road in their direction, and slowly raised its massive, mutant arm in something like a wave. Lilith waved back. Satisfied, the lab rat scuttled over to the nearest body and began to eat.

Lilith grimaced. “Circle of life, huh?”

“Yep.” Axton sounded distracted, and Lilith glanced over at him. His eyes were fixed on the horizon while he wiped the blood from his hands and wrists with a grease-spotted rag.

“What's up?” she asked.

The distant look fled, and the young commando flashed her an apologetic grin. “It's nothing. Well...it's kind of something. Do you think it's possible to know someone for awhile, and someday think about them differently? To have your feelings change?"

“..Huh?” she asked.

“You know, when someone you've been friends with for awhile does something that makes you see them in a new light. Something like—and this is a completely random, arbitrary example, of course—slaughter a ton of Bloodshots without breaking a sweat.” He leaned over his knees, a roguish grin spreading across his face. “Someone who could do an amazing thing like that...I can't help but wonder what it'd be like to kiss that person.”

She didn't mean to, but Lilith couldn't help but laugh. “Smooth as a baby's ass. Does that line ever work?”

Axton took the laughter in stride, his smile never faltering. “More often than you'd think. For you, I had to take the chance. Although I really should have learned my lesson about fraternizing with my commanding officers."”

“Wait. Aren't you already with someone?” Lilith asked.

“Uh, well. Sort of.”

“That engineer out in the Dust.”

“That's right. But I only see him when I get out that way, and the Raiders keep me really busy. What am I supposed to do while I'm stuck here? I'm human. I get lonely. I figured you'd probably feel the same-”

“No. I don't,” Lilith interrupted. In her lap, tiny flames bounced across the backs of her hands, rolling over her bunched knuckles. “And I think you're being an unbelievable ass right now. What if your partner could hear you? If he knew that you-”

“Easy!” Axton raised his hands in surrender. “I get it. You're not interested.”

“A relationship means something to some people, you know. You don't just go around hitting on everything with a pulse the second your boyfriend leaves the room. That's not right! It's disgusting, actually.”

Axton scooted as far back as he could on the chests where he sat, staring at her with wide eyes. Lilith had, at some point, leaped to her feet. Flames coiled through her fingers like snakes, making a plume of black smoke that whipped along after the truck.

“I've clearly touched on a sore spot,” Axton said, “And I'm sorry, really. I didn't mean to piss you off.”

Lilith tried to take deep breaths and calm herself, but failed to banish the anger flickering in her throat. She guessed that if she opened her mouth, more accusations would come tumbling out. Sanctuary was still a speck in the distance. There was no way she could ride all the back with Axton now, even though it wasn't even his fault. Everyone knew the man was a dog. Probably even his partner out in the Dust knew, but that didn't matter. She'd been yelling at Axton, but she'd mean the words for Brick, and even more for herself.

“I have to go,” she said.

“What are you going to do, walk all the way back? Stay. I promise I won't hit on you again. It was stupid, anyway.”

Lilith wasn't listening. In a blink and a flash of purple fire, she was gone, leaping through the other dimension. The trip was near instantaneous.

She'd closed her eyes on Axton sitting against a backdrop of snowy screes, but she opened them on a small, warped door set into a winding block of apartments. She looked up. The buildings bowed to each other across the street, slumped by age, so only a thin strip of sky showed through between the roofs. Dawn brightened the darkness, turning the stars into barely visible motes.

It hadn't been her intention to come here. Her urgency to escape had driven her to jump without thinking, to take a gamble on her destination, and her traitorous heart had taken her to Brick and Mordecai's stoop.

She raised her fist to knock on the door, then hesitated. What if Mordecai had come home, and they were discussing the kiss right now? Or worse, what if he hadn't, and Brick was in there by himself? Then she would be alone with him. It would be better to phasewalk in and scope it out, then come back out and knock if the coast was clear.

Before Lilith could do that, she had to recharge her powers. The jump had sapped her strength. She found the trinket in the pouch on her hip, just where she'd left it, and folded her fingers around the chunk of eridium. It had been compressed, concentrating a great deal of power into a tiny stone. Still, this one would be exhausted before long if she kept using it for crap like this. With her fist curled around the trinket, she felt the energy flow back into her veins. She sighed.

The surge of power made it easy for Lilith to duck back into the purple, to slip through the solid door in a dimension where the door didn't exist. The apartment was dark, and for a moment Lilith thought Brick had gone. Then she heard a voice from the bedroom: Mordecai's. If he'd sounded angry, she might have left, but his tone was even, and she caught her own name. Although they wouldn't be able to see her in phasewalk, Lilith crossed the room lightly and peered through the bedroom door.

“Why aren't you coming?” Mordecai asked. They were curled up together on the bed where Brick and Lilith had recently laid side by side. The slender sniper had peeled off his scarf and shirt and abandoned them on the floor, leaving him naked to the waist, while Brick had put on a pair of sweatpants and a tanktop.

Brick traced Mordecai's jaw with a line of soft kisses before replying. “I was gonna, but there's a surprise, and I'll ruin it if I'm there. I'm no good at keepin secrets. Can't tell you no more than that.”

“But-”

“Besides, Lil needs a break. She ain't had a day off in months.”

“That's...that's true. I know. She deserves a break,” Mordecai said, sending a sliver of guilt through Lilith's chest. “I'll miss you, though.”

“I'll miss you, too. But you're gonna love the Grotto. Lotsa stuff to shoot, lotsa spots to snipe from. And Hammerlock'll show you around.”

“Why can't all three of us go, again?”

“Someone's gotta hold down the fort here.”

“And that's you?” Mordecai asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

Brick scoffed. “I used to be a bandit king, y'know. I'm plenty good at givin orders.”

Mordecai scrambled to his knees to lean over the larger man and planted a steadying hand on his broad shoulder. “What a coincidence,” he growled into Brick's ear, his voice so low that Lilith could barely hear him from the doorway. “I'm good at following orders. So, _mi rey..._ What do you want me to do?” he asked, returning Brick's earlier ministrations with a few firmer kisses.

“Uh...could you lemme up? Sorry. I wanna shower first.”

“You can shower after. When I'm done with you, you'll _need_ a shower.”

“Sorry,” Brick repeated, wriggling out from under the smaller man and swinging his feet off the bed.

“Then I'll join you.”

“Uh...Not this time.”

“Okay?” Mordecai watched Brick's retreating figure. When the bathroom door clicked shut behind him, Mordecai slumped into the pillows, a faint frown stretching the corners of his mouth. “What the hell?” he whispered to himself.

For a minute, Lilith stood in the bedroom and weighed her options. Then she followed Brick into the bathroom. By the time she entered, he'd already kicked off his clothes and disappeared into the shower. The spray filled the room with a masking layer of sound. Through the shower wall, Lilith saw Brick as that same mosaic of color, that pinky, peachy painting. She punched back into that universe with as little disruption as possible.

“Brick,” she hissed.

“Wha...Shit!” Brick stumbled back. His bulk hit the wall with a resonating 'thud'.

Mordecai's voice rose over the hiss of the shower. “You okay? What was that?”

“Sorry! Just slipped. I'm fine,” Brick called back. To his credit, he managed to sound reasonably composed, despite the blurred shape of the siren standing outside the shower, regarding him through the textured plastic with both hands on her hips.

“Oh,” Mordecai said. “Oh-kay.”

“What that hell are you doin?” Brick leaned closer to whisper, until Lilith could almost make out the planes of his face, the caverns under his eyes.

“I'm not the one on trial, here.”

“You snuck into my bathroom!”

“Keep it down. I heard you talking to Mordecai about the Grotto. What is that, and why are you sending us there?”

“It's a trip, a vacation I been plannn for awhile. I was gonna take Mordy, but, uh...I gotta stay here. I need to think.”

“You?”

“Hey, I think about stuff.”

Lilith sighed, sinking down to sit on the closed toilet lid, and buried her face in her hands. “Are you gonna tell him what happened?”

“That's what I hafta think about.”

“It was just a stupid, drunken mistake. He doesn't have to find out, does he? Not if it could mess shit up for you guys.”

Brick didn't reply right away. Lilith looked up, but she couldn't gauge his expression through the plastic. When he finally spoke again, his voice sounded strange, thick and low. “Yeah. That...I guess so.”

“Brick.”

“Huh?”

Lilith was struck by the sudden, insane impulse to say nothing, but to step out of her clothes and join the man in the shower. Her unnatural heat, that siren heat, would turn the tepid bathroom into a sauna the instant she saw him, and the water would burst into steam, hiding them in a deep, dense fog. They would have to find each other by touch. She could practically feel it: the tentative brush of Brick's fingers against her breast, her belly, her inner-thigh. There, his wandering touch would find purpose.

She thought about it, but didn't act. Instead, she placed a splay-fingered, flat palm against the shower wall. A moment later, Brick's pressed against hers on the other side. His massive hand dwarfed her smaller one.

“It was a mistake. Right?” she asked.

He made some kind of gesture, but she couldn't tell what it was through the textured plastic. It might have been a shrug or a nod, or he might have shaken his head. Lilith didn't stick around to find out. If she found out that Brick had shaken his head, it would have weakened her resolve. She might have slipped into the shower, after all.

Upon entering phasewalk again, her hand vanished, leaving Brick's alone against the pane.

 


	5. The Hunt

Hammerlock stood them up. When Lilith and Mordecai arrived through the Fast Travel, they found nobody waiting for them, so they struck out for the lodge on their own. Their HUD maps were worthless. The Grotto was a cave, split and pocketed by smaller caves, tunnels, and tributaries, making any map a useless mess of overlapping lines. Several times they trekked toward what they hoped would be a tunnel leading out, only to find impassable stone, the exit somewhere above or below.

The two friends had begun the hike in good spirits, but had broken down into bickering by the fifth or sixth dead-end, insisting that the other had led them the wrong way. One of Mordecai's long-argued choices eventually led them out of the tunnels and into the open air, a triumph that made him insufferably smug.

“You didn't know it would take us out,” Lilith insisted.

“We're here, aren't we?” Mordecai said, gesturing at the landscape around them: miles of stinking, sticky bog broken up by swells of scraggly grass, with a stone ceiling high overhead. “I just studied at the map, and-”

“The map is useless.”

“I used it.”

“You _guessed._ ”

Mordecai didn't reply, but his lip curled up in a self-satisfied grin. Lilith fought the urge to slap the look off his stupid, smug face.

In one direction, the deeper recesses of the cave stretched on and on, shadowy and seemingly without end. In the other direction, the sun was sinking outside the cave's awesome mouth, casting long shadows from pillars of stone that jutted up like teeth. The sky turned pink and then red as the pair made their way toward the Lodge. They'd spotted the place as soon as they'd hit open air: a large, unmistakable cabin on stilts.

Humidity laid Lilith's hair flat against her scalp. It made her feel like a woman swimming in a nightmare, sluggish and unable to draw a full breath. Clouds of tiny insects flocked around them, alighting briefly on their skin to drink their sweat and blood, then wobbling away with full bellies. Slapping didn't help. Slapping only led to discerning smears of their own blood which attracted more pests.

“Stairs,” Mordecai huffed, pausing to catch his breath before mounting another rise of steps. “Why are there so many stairs?”

“Keep up, old man,” Lilith called back. She'd gotten a full flight of stairs ahead, and maintained her lead the rest of the way to the Lodge. She banged on the door as hard as she could.

Mordecai caught up before anyone came to answer. “He's not home?”

“He has to be home,” Lilith growled between gritted teeth. “Alistair! Hobble out here, you lazy ass!”

“Hey,” Mordecai said, his brows furrowed above his opaque goggles. “It's not his fault that you got us lost.”

“You...! I didn't-” Something caught Lilith's eye, and the argument withered on the tip of her tongue. A curl of paper rested against the base of the door. She bent to pick it up.

“The door is unlocked,” she read aloud. “I'm sincerely sorry that I couldn't be here to welcome you, but you will understand soon. Please make yourself at home. Signed, Alistair Hammerlock.”

“Sounds good,” Mordecai said, pushing past Lilith to let himself into the Lodge. True to Hammerlock's word, the door swung inward with no resistance, and the rustically decorated interior welcomed them with a cool, dusty belch of air that smelled like library stacks. They shoulder-checked each other through the doorway.

Lilith flocked straight to reading nook: more specifically, to the armchair nestled between volumes of dusty field notes. She flopped into Hammerlock's ass-print. With her legs thrown up over the arm of the chair, she found herself staring up at the large, gray object suspended above. She squinted.

It was a skull. Lilith was staring up through its neck, straight into where its brains had once been. Other bones hung around the skull like moons around a planet, still spinning gently from the force of the front door being slammed shut.

“What is that thing?” she said. “Can you tell from there?”

'There' was a bar stool halfway across the room. Mordecai had been magnetized to that stool just as Lilith had been drawn to the chair, and he now leaned over the bar to pluck a bottle of wine from an open rack. He glanced back at the skull.

“Oh, I don't know. Some kind of...” He shrugged. “Something he killed, probably.”

Lilith looked back up into the empty head of the beast. From where Mordecai sat, there came the protest and breathy pop of a cork, then the glug as he tipped the bottle over a glass: pouring a lot, she guessed, from the amount of glug-glug-glugs that followed.

“Kind of early to be drinking,” Lilith said, in careful tones of non-judgment.

Mordecai grunted. “What can I say? I need a buzz, being stuck in this shithole with you.”

“Listen, dickhead. I didn't ask to be here and I didn't tell Brick to stay behind to take care of the Raider stuff. That was his idea.”

“He told you?”

“Yeah. I know it was going to be you and him on this trip. So, sorry, but you _are_ stuck with me. Why don't you just...pour me a glass, too.”

“You said it was too early.”

“I changed my mind. When in Pandora's swampy asscrack...” or however the saying went. She went to slump on the stool beside Mordecai and quickly knocked back the glass he poured for her.

“I'm not disappointed,” he said. “About being here with you.”

“Sure,” Lilith said dismissively, and tipped the bottle back over her glass.

“Really. This place isn't exactly a romantic getaway, and I'd rather be at your throat than Brick's.”

“Oh, well. I'm flattered,” Lilith snorted around a mouthful of wine.

Mordecai noticed the second slip of paper before the two of them got too sloshed. It was weighted to the counter by a bottle. Mordecai slid the note out, looked at it for a moment, then read it out loud.

“Find the first clue between an old man's gnarled hands.”

“A riddle?” Lilith asked.

“I guess. Brick didn't tell me there was going to be a scavenger hunt.”

“He said there was a surprise,” Lilith reminded him.

Mordecai studied her for a long moment, his expression hidden behind the green lenses of his goggles. Lilith remembered, too late, that she'd eavesdropped on that conversation.

“He told you that?” Mordecai asked.

“Uh-huh. While you were packing, I think.” She took the paper from him and pretended to study Brick's careful handwriting, although it said nothing more than what Mordecai had read to her.

“Oh. What do you think he means? An old man's gnarled hands...”

Lilith squinted at Mordecai's fingers curled around the wine glass, and he scowled at her.

“I'm not that old!”

“Maybe it's a metaphor. Something in the Grotto that looks like hands.”

“Worth a try,” Mordecai said, standing up from the bar while knocking back the last swig of his wine. Lilith left her own half full. Hammerlock had ditched them, so he could clean up the mess.

Two packs leaned against the wall beside the door. Lilith and Mordecai hadn't seen them on the way in, but they'd been arranged so they couldn't miss them on the way out. On a third note, 'Stuff' had been blocked out in Brick's neat script, and beneath it, Hammerlock clarified: 'Provisions'.

“I guess these are for us,” Mordecai said.

They slung the packs over their shoulders, and Lilith couldn't help but worry about the size and weight. It felt like someone had packed enough enough for days.

* * *

 

“You were supposed to be watching our backs!” Mordecai snapped, pulling his sniper rifle out of digistruct limbo.

“I was,” Lilith lied. She'd been lost in thought since about the third freezing creek they'd slogged through, her eyes fixed blankly on the pair of bare, scraggly trees that they'd agreed to investigate. It hadn't looked like such a long way through Mordecai's scope. It was a _good_ scope. They'd left Hammerlock's lodge over an hour ago.

“You did a shit job, then.”

The retort of Mordecai's rifle split the silence, and the floating spore jerked slightly. The creature had approached soundlessly and been nearly overhead by the time Mordecai spotted it, and only because it had finally loosed a thrumming cry and sent down a barrage of smaller spores that exploded on impact with the ground. The friends had ducked into the cover of a ridge.

Lilith aimed one of her Maliwan SMGs. Flames licked from the barrel and arced toward the creature, setting its bulbous yellow belly ablaze.

“Hah!”

The thing gave a phlegmy shriek, and its portly body pitched out of the sky, plummeting into the bog with a splash. Lilith turned to see Mordecai holding out a fist. That fanged grin had returned, and she matched it as she bumped her knuckles against his.

“Nice shot,” he admitted. “Not as good as mine, but if I had the Orion-”

A nearby explosion cut him off. Several smaller versions of the spore flapped down toward them, alarmingly close. Lilith dropped into the protection of the ridge and pulled Mordecai down on top of her. More spores blasted the stone outside.

“Thanks,” Mordecai said. “Wouldn't have needed that if you'd been looking out, though.”

“Blow me,” Lilith said, but a laugh betrayed her relief.

They remained in the shelter for a lingering moment, grinning absently at each other, until Mordecai seemed to realize that he was lying on top of her. He rolled off. Lilith sat up with her heart knocking against her ribs. She sneaked a glance at Mordecai, who was shouldering his pack with single-minded purpose.

“We're almost there. If we hurry, we'll get there before dark.”

He was wrong, and they stumbled between the knobby trees half an hour later, well after the sun disappeared entirely behind the cave's jaw. The sun had taken the heat with it, leaving the Grotto cold enough to make Lilith's teeth chatter. A faint, flickering light from somewhere ahead drew them onward.

They found the source of the light inside a small cave. There, a narrow flight of stairs led upward, and the chamber opened out. A small campfire had been lit in the center. It crackled with welcoming warmth.

Mordecai looked around. “Brick?”

“An igniter,” Lilith said. She'd crossed the space to the center, and now she knelt by the fire. Steel glinted through the ceramic made to look like sticks, but the flames were real, and they radiated a welcome heat. Lilith sighed closer and stretched her palms forward the warmth.

Mordecai looked disappointed as he sat, cross-legged, across from her. “When I saw the fire, I thought...”

“That Brick changed his mind,” Lilith finished.

He hesitated, then nodded.

“It would have been cool if he'd come along,” Lilith said.

“Just like old times,” Mordecai agreed. “I miss that stuff. Remember how Brick used to whistle while we were all trying to sleep, and how you'd get all pissed off, because the song always got stuck in your head? And you'd start whistling it, too.”

“And you were always tired and pissy the next day, screaming at everyone for blocking your shots.”

“That wasn't my fault. You were all terrible. Brick running out front, and that damn kill-stealing turret. Remember how Rola...uh.”

 _Roland_. Lilith stared into the flames.

“Not exactly like old times,” Mordecai amended.

“This is fine, though.”

He didn't argue with her, but they didn't talk for awhile, either. A warble from Lilith's stomach broke the silence. She dragged her pack closer from where she'd tossed it on the ground, pushed open the flap and began to rummage. She had to pull out each object to see it by firelight.

A change of clothes—Brick's clothes, she noticed. He hadn't gotten around to replacing them—and three pairs of socks, a crinkly plastic bag full of jerky, which Lilith set aside, two bottles of water, and...

“Gross,” she muttered, and shoved the tube of lubricant back into the depths of the pack.

“Oh, grow up,” Mordecai scoffed. “You know that Brick and I have sex.”

“Yeah, but I try not to think about it.”

“Really?”

“Of course! Why the hell would I want that image in my head?”

“Because we're great at it. Seriously,” Mordecai said, leaning forward. Shadows did a sinister dance across his grinning face. “Imagine me and Brick doing the nasty, right now.”

Lilith rolled her eyes, but his words had found their mark; her brain automatically obeyed the order. She doubted this was what Mordecai had intended, though, or that he'd meant for it to be so graphic. The image her mind conjured was of Mordecai kneeling, of Brick standing and reaching down to grab to his dreads. He had the shorter man pinned against a wall. Lilith couldn't see the action from the angle she imagined, but if the flex of Brick's ass and roll of his hips were any indication, she was missing quite a show.

Back in reality, she swallowed.

Mordecai crowed. “You really thought about it!”

Lilith felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “You made it hard not to.”

“Was it good? Did we use the lube?” Mordecai asked.

“You don't need lube for what you were doing.”

“Were we...uh...” Mordecai trailed off, then sidled around the fire to sit next to Lilith. He whispered something into her ear behind a cupped hand.

“No! That's disgusting. Do you guys do that?”

“If we did, I wouldn't tell you now,” Mordecai said, laughing.

Someone—Brick, presumably—had heaped piles of bedding against one wall of the cave, a large nest of pillows and blankets and, underneath the whole mess, a thin air mattress- but only one.

“We've been sleeping together, anyways,” Mordecai said.

He didn't point out the obvious; That had been different. The presence of Brick had made it different. That was three friends sharing a bed, not two half-drunk people on a camping trip, faces flushed from the heat and the inappropriate teasing that they'd continued throughout the evening. But there was only one mattress, and that left them with little choice.

She shouldn't have worried. Mordecai fell asleep immediately, his mouth gaped open, his breath whining through one stuffed nostril. Lilith wasn't so lucky. Minutes wore on, but she couldn't sleep. That faint whine began to wear on her nerves. Every time she closed her eyes, images came to her, unbidden: Brick in panties, drunk and lax-limbed, sprawled across the bed. Mordecai regarding her with a lopsided grin in the shadow of the ridge, that sharp tooth bright in the darkness. And, most persistently, the image she'd conjured up by the campfire- her two friends engaged in an act she had no business thinking about, which definitely shouldn't cause the tickle that slithered through her belly and came to nest between her legs.

After what felt like hours, Lilith rolled over quietly toward the far end of the bed and half buried her face in the pillow. One eye remained fixed on Mordecai so she'd know if he woke up. With his face in sight, she slid one hand beneath her and and unbuttoned her jeans with practiced fingers.

 _This is a terrible idea,_ she thought, even as new images replaced the others.

She imagined the same thing any time she couldn't sleep: a man climbing into bed, holding her from behind. She couldn't see his face. Even though he cupped her breasts with a soldier's calloused hands, that didn't mean anything. There were lots of soldiers. And if she'd felt those same kisses against her neck a thousand times, and heard her name murmured by that same dusky voice, that didn't mean anything, either.

Those imagined hands—those not-Roland hands—mirrored her own, which she slid, flat-palmed, into the open fly of her jeans and past the hem of her panties. Only, in her mind, she was naked, as was the man who held her, and she flexed around his familiar girth. In her mind, it was a soldier's strong fingers that rubbed her.

She mounted the rise of pleasure as quickly as she was able, trying to finish before Mordecai could wake up. But just when she neared the peak, her fantasy changed. Not-Roland was replaced by the image of Brick and Mordecai, the one from before, but now she could see everything. She could see Mordecai's cheeks bulge, and the tears that pricked his eyelashes when Brick pushed too deep down his throat.

When she came a moment later, it was hard and sudden and over fast, making her squirm against her fingers and loose a moan into the pillow. She squeezed her thighs together, savoring the swollen, sore feeling. She cast a look at Mordecai. His eyes were still closed, his chest still rising and falling in the deep, even rhythm of sleep.

At the bottom of the hill, she found an unexpected valley of guilt. For what, she wondered? For fantasizing about her friends? What they didn't know couldn't hurt them. Then, in her imagination, she found herself back in the arms of the stranger, the one who she'd been monogamous to in her singular fantasy. For a month and a half, she'd thought of nobody else.

 _It's okay,_ she imagined the stranger— _Roland,_ she finally admitted to herself—saying, as he gathered her into unreal arms.

 _No, it's not. Nothing is okay,_ Lilith argued.

But Mordecai's even breathing began to lull her into a doze, in spite of the low-grade misery strumming the base of her skull. A sound snapped her back to consciousness; a sudden, sharp hiss. Her eyes cracked open.

Mordecai blinked around at the cave, his empty eye flashing like a moon in the firelight. He didn't seem to notice that his awakening had roused Lilith. Eventually he slumped back into the heap of bedding. Lilith was just drifting off again when she heard another sound, unmistakable and strikingly loud in the quiet cave- a zipper being unzipped, and the rustle of fabric.

She tried not to notice when the quality of Mordecai's breathing changed, or listen intently for what she guessed was coming. It did, and she heard it, too- a single, low grunt that nonetheless sent a throb through her. There was more rustling as Mordecai did something else. _H_ _e's cleaning up,_ Lilith thought, burying her blush in the pillow. Then, at last, silence. But that tickle was back in her belly, and worse than ever.

Lilith sighed. It was going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't planning for this to go on so long, but it looks like the Grotto is going to be three chapters. They're going to be good chapters, though. (I hope)


	6. The Journey

 

A weight on Lilith's belly snapped her awake. Her fingertips tingled, sparking reflexively in response to the threat. But there was no threat- only Mordecai, straddling her and grinning ear to ear. He looked like he'd been up for awhile, his dreads tamed into a ponytail and wrapped by his red scarf, his goggles concealing that odd eye.

“What?” Lilith huffed.

“Found the clue,” Mordecai said, and held up something that appeared oily in the faint, flickering light cast by the fire. It was a bottle with a wick of paper sticking out of the top, which Mordecai plucked between thumb and forefinger. He had to set down the bottle and use both hands to stretch out the tightly rolled note.

“What time is it?” Lilith asked.

Mordecai ignored her, his gaze flicking over the note. “Find the next clue somewhere that you'd have desert after a real kick-ass dinner date,” he read. An easy smile lit across his face.

“You know it?” Lilith asked.

“You don't?”

Lilith scowled. The abrupt awakening had already put her on edge—her dreams had been a continuation of the fantasies she'd had the night before, and she was reluctant to emerge from them—and Mordecai's preening didn't help.

“If you know the answer, spit it out,” she snapped.

Mordecai's response was to put his hands behind his head and roll his hips, a gesture so obscene that Lilith briefly wondered if she was still asleep, if this was just another dream. But Mordecai's lips weren't parted slightly or bitten by his top teeth; instead, they were split by a grin. She hated him for being able to smile after a fewer hours of sleep than she had fingers on a hand. She raised a particular finger now, but Mordecai just grinned wider.

“Where do you eat after a dinner date goes well, Lil?”

Suddenly, Lilith understood. “I doubt he wrote the clue on your dick.”

“Nah. Well, we can check, but-” his fingers came to rest on the strap of his belt, and Lilith rolled her eyes. “How about you?” he asked. “You got a bottle jammed up there?”

“You better hope not,” Lilith said. Mordecai's smile, while infuriated, was also infectious, and her own lips turned upward against her will. “That would mean your boyfriend stuck it there.”

Mordecai scoffed. “Brick wouldn't touch a vagina with someone else's dick.”

“Shut up!” Lilith yelped, shock forcing a bark of laughter from her throat. “That's...” _Not true._ But then, how would she know? Brick had only kissed her. A faint, unwelcome twinge of disappointment chased her surprise. “That's gross. Don't say shit like that.”

Mordecai stood up, finally, and reached down to help Lilith struggle out of the tangled blankets.

“When we were looking at the map yesterday, I saw a place called the Undercarriage. That's probably what he meant,” he said.

“Sounds good. I gotta do something before we go. Over there. Through that tunnel.”

Mordecai stared at her for an awkward moment.

“I gotta piss.”

“Oh. Well, go on. I'm not your daddy. I'm not gonna hold your hand."

Lilith huffed and grumbled past him. “Jerk,” she muttered as she rounded the corner, emerging into a narrower cavern, this one just tall enough to stand up in and barely lit by the campfire's glow. But the tunnel was empty and out of the main cavern's line of sight, which was all that mattered. She undid her jeans and pulled them down to her knees.

After six years in the wilds of Pandora, Lilith knew how to piss without getting it all over her pants. She bunched the fabric as far forward as she could and braced herself against the stone with her free hand. Just when she'd gotten into position, Mordecai called from the main cavern.

“I think I know what the prize is,” he said. “For the scavenger hunt.”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“I bet Brick is waiting for us. He's probably got a whole romantic thing planned.”

“How would that be a prize for me?” Lilith willed her bladder to let go in spite of the interruption, but it wouldn't cooperate.

“Maybe he got you a date.”

“I'm not looking for a date. And if I were, I could find someone myself.”

Lilith waited for Mordecai's reply, but it didn't come. She should have taken the opportunity to finish her business. Instead, she held it and scowled. “You think I'm full of shit? Axton tried to ask me out the other day.”

“Really? Doesn't he have a boyfriend?”

“Yes! You should have heard the line he used on me. It was so lame. He was like...” Lilith paused. When she went on, it was in a deep, exaggerated parody of Axton's voice. “Do you think you can feel different about someone after knowing them for a long time? Gosh, Lil, you're so awesome and beautiful and badass, but I never realized that I wanted to bone you before.” She shook her head.

“So?” Mordecai asked.

“So what?”

“Are you gonna go out with him?”

“No!” The question was so unexpected that Lilith nearly fell back on her ass, but she caught herself against the cave wall. Her legs were beginning to tingle, her blood flow constricted by squatting for so long. “I told you, he's already with someone.”

“Maybe they have an open relationship.”

Lilith hadn't asked; hadn't even considered it. She wouldn't have gone out with Axton anyway. “No,” she answered.

“I believe you can, by the way. Start seeing someone differently after knowing them for a long time,” Mordecai said.

Lilith had to agree, having become uncomfortably familiar with the phenomenon over the last few days. She was struck by the sudden surety that Mordecai was about to confess that he'd been feeling that way about her. After a long, empty silence, she realized that she still needed to say something. “Y-yeah?”

“Sure. That's what happened with Brick and me.”

 _Ah,_ Lilith thought. Of course that's what he'd meant. Her eyes fixed on a mosquito that had just wobbled in from the other chamber. Its body was plump and ungainly, full to bursting with someone's blood. 

“When he was pinned under the barge, I thought he was going to die...” Mordecai trailed off, his voice thoughtful. “I loved him. I knew for sure, even though I'd never thought of him like that before. I'd have given anything for another day with him.”

“Gay,” Lilith said.

Her bladder finally let go. Thankfully, she'd kept the hold on her jeans, bunching them away from her body. Her boots were sprayed by the force of her long-held stream, but that was fine. They'd be soaked by the bog soon enough, anyway.

Mordecai chuckled, the 'hur, hur, hur' which was the singular property of boys and men acting like boys. “I can hear that.”

“Oh, shut up,” Lilith snapped. When she finally finished peeing—it seemed to take forever with Mordecai listening—she stood up and cinched her jeans back around her hips. She wished she'd bought something to wipe with. Mordecai was still grinning when she rounded the corner, and she punched him in the arm.

The blow didn't sour his mood a bit, though, and he whistled on his way out of the cave, rattling the nerves of the siren who followed a few paces behind him.

* * *

 They found the Undercarriage after a long slog across the Grotto. The place turned out to be a tavern, tended by a barkeep who'd been given a message for them: go on to the lodge at the top of the stairs. Mordecai had complained about the steps up to Hammerlock's, but that was nothing compared to these. Flight after flight bore them upward. By the time they reached the lodge, the faint brightness of dawn had begun to color the enormous cavern.

The barkeep had given them a key, and Lilith used to let herself into the dark, musty smelling, but otherwise pleasant lodge. She flopped down on the double bed and napped for a blessed hour. Mordecai woke her later by slamming the door open.

“Lil! Come see this.”

She was on her feet and out the door before she was even fully awake. Mordecai stood on the balcony, facing away. The sun was rising. It painted the Grotto pink. A morning fogbank washed out the most distant pillars of stone, while dawn softened edges of the nearest. A flock of spores cut stark silhouettes against the dewy sky.

“Beautiful,” Lilith said.

Mordecai tapped her on the shoulder, drawing her out of her trance. He held something out to here. Sunrise caught in the champagne flute, making the glass appear to be full of fire. Once she took it, Mordecai slumped down into a wicker patio chair and retrieved his own flute from a table. Lilith sat wordlessly in the chair beside him.

“Brick left this stuff,” he said, gesturing to the table.

Lilith saw the cooler he'd unpacked on the floor, open and empty. A pail of ice with a sweating bottle of champagne sat on the table, alongside a bowl of strawberries. Lilith's stomach had an immediate reaction to that flash of bright red. It growled, loud enough that Mordecai smirked and passed the bowl.

After gracelessly wolfing down half the strawberries and washing them down with the champagne, Lilith slouched back and sighed. “This is nice.”

“We forgot to toast,” Mordecai said, twisting the stem of his empty glass between thumb and forefinger, catching arrows of light across the rim.

“To Brick,” Lilith said, and raised her own empty glass to clink against his. “Nah, screw him. He ditched us. Uh...to us?”

“To us,” Mordecai agreed.

While he was digging the champagne bottle out of its pail, making a racket that sounded too loud against the gauzy, quiet dawn, Lilith spotted something hanging from the rafters. She got up and crossed the balcony to investigate.

The second clue bottle swung lazily, pushed by a breeze so light that Lilith couldn't feel it. She cut the string with a long thumbnail and pulled the twist of paper out, then brought it back to Mordecai. When she read the note, first to herself, she couldn't help but laugh.

“What's it say?” Mordecai asked.

She handed him the paper. Brick's neat printing on this one had been harder to read, mostly because it had been erased and written over so many times. The gray ghosts of previous words made smudgy backdrop for the text.

What Brick had finally blocked out was this: “Can't think of a good clue. Just go to Sundrop Cavern.”

* * *

The barkeep at the Undercarriage lent them the Catch-a-Ride key, so they were able to digistruct a fanboat. That was good, because they had to pass through miles of Sunflower Swamp to get to the caverns. A pack of raiders in another boat ambushed them on the way. Lilith fought back, and a volley of chain gun fire from the mounted turret sent their attackers spinning into a cliff. The vehicle exploded in a ball of flames and oily, blue-black smoke. Lilith and Mordecai whooped and slapped each other high five as they whisked past the wreck.

“Turn here,” Lilith called over the roar of the engine.

The entrance to the cavern was marked only by a wire strung from a nearby town and through the cave. Bare bulbs dotted the wire at regular intervals, illuminating the river that wound deeper into the chasm. Soon the channel narrowed too much for the fanboat. Lilith and Mordecai continued on foot, splashing through knee-deep water.

“This place is creepy,” Lilith said, looking around at the limestone walls and the bioluminescent fungi clumped in the cracks.

“Yeah, I thought it was gonna be...” Mordecai waved, looking for a word. “Sunnier, with a name like Sundrop Caverns.”

The name became clear as they rounded a bend in the tunnel. The water brightened ahead of them, shivering with refracted light. A minute later, the tributary opened out into an underground lake, where vines as thick as rakk hive legs had forced their way through the ceiling of the cave, opening massive cracks that sunlight fell through. Further still, one end of the cavern opened out onto a steep limestone bowl. Water spilled from the rim of that bowl and fell straight down into the basin. Smaller waterfalls fed the lake. Flowers the size of truck tires bloomed on the vines.

“Wow,” Lilith breathed.

“Look,” Mordecai said. Lilith followed his gaze, and saw the rumpled heap of fabric tossed against one wall. A few feet away, a wicker basket lay on its side. It looked as though something with huge claws had shredded it. The basket's contents were strewn across the ground, crushed and shattered.

Mordecai waded slowly out of the water and knelt beside the mess. When Lilith caught up and crouched beside him, she saw a faint smile across his face.

“That idiot,” he muttered. “Some animal got into it. He shouldn't have left it out.”

Lilith looked around, but whatever had trashed the picnic seemed to have gone. The only movement in the chamber was the rushing water and gently bobbing heads of massive flowers.

“Oh well,” she sighed. “We don't really need a romantic picnic, anyway. This stuff...it's not for me. It was supposed to be for you and Brick. God, I feel like-”

Mordecai jabbed her in the thigh with a rigid knuckle. Lilith gasped. The blow twanged the muscle, sending shudders of agony rippling all up and down her leg.

“What the hell!” she hissed, clutching her cramping leg.

“Since you were whining, I thought I'd give you something to cry about.”

“I...you...! I can't believe I ever...” _wanted to kiss you._ Lilith scowled and shook her head. “You're such an asshole. Since you crippled me, _you_ go look for the clue.”

Mordecai obeyed with a grin, and Lilith sat back on her butt, still massaging her thigh. The pain slowly warbled out while she watched her friend wander around the cavern, peering into shallow pools and kicking aside debris. He stopped.

“Did you find it?”

Without answering, Mordecai bent down to pick something up. Not a bottle, but an armload of something white. He brought it back to where she rested against the cavern wall.

“Towels. You wanna go swimming?”

“I didn't bring a suit,” Lilith said.

“You've got underwear, right? Or don't you?” It was amazing how that eyetooth could be so sexy sometimes, and other times make Lilith want to punch it right out of Mordecai's smart-ass mouth.

“Then they'll get my clothes wet. I hate that.”

“So, don't wear them.”

“You want us to go skinny dipping," Lilith said, with a flat note of disbelief in her voice.

“Why not?” Mordecai asked, already unwinding his scarf and peeling off his shirt. “It's not like someone's gonna see.”

“I'm someone,” Lilith pointed out. “You're someone.”

Still, she climbed to her feet, shrugged off her vest and kicked off her boots. The water did look inviting. She was about to extract a promise from Mordecai to not look at her, or at least to not remark on her body, when she found herself unable to do the same.

“Whoah,” she said.

“What?” Mordecai had shucked all of his clothes except for his boots, and he paused, hopping on one foot with a heel clutched in both hands.

“Uh. Nothing. It's nothing bad.”

“You're freaking me out, Lil.”

“It's just...yours is bigger than Brick's,” she said, the words spilling out in a breathless rush.

“No, it's not,” Mordecai dismissed, and tossed his boots into the pile of clothes. He turned and started down to the lake, then paused and looked back around at Lilith. She self-consciously wrapped her arms around her breasts, forgetting to cover the v between her tightly pressed thighs.

“How would you know, anyway?” Mordecai asked. “You've seen Brick's?”

 _Oh. Oh, shit._ Lilith chewed her lip, then stopped when she remembered that Mordecai was watching her. “Kind of. We got drunk and traded underwear.”

“You...! I knew it! I asked Brick where my stash went, and he made up this bullshit story about a bird flying in the window. He figured I wouldn't get mad at a bird. I swear...” Mordecai blinked. “You traded underwear? Like, he was wearing yours?”

Lilith passed him and stepped into the pool. She waded quickly up to her waist. The water was chilly but not freezing, and swilled gently by the waterfalls. It felt great, like a rumpled swathe of cool silk against her overheated skin. She heard Mordecai splash into the water behind her.

“Pretty good,” she said, after contemplating a moment. She couldn't exactly tell him the truth- that Brick had looked dead sexy, and that his nearly naked, long bodied stretch across the bed still haunted her. “You'd have liked it.”

“I bet.” Mordecai strolled up alongside her. He flashed her a coy look. “So, you looked, huh? Not too close, if you think I've got the bigger dick.”

“You do! His seemed surprisingly average.”

“I bet it was just scared of you, witch-lady.”

“Fine. When we get back, I'll line you up and compare,” Lilith said, answering Mordecai's relentless teasing with a jab of her own. As soon as she'd said it, though, Mordecai turned serious.

“Pervert,” he said.

Lilith fumed. “You're one to talk. Aren't you the cuckold who let your boyfriend hump me the other night?”

“Cuckold!” Mordecai crowed, a laugh shining in that infuriating eyetooth. “You wish.”

She flipped him off and found that her middle finger had become a torch. The flare of anger had spurred her siren powers, filling her palm with fire that looped around her wrist and wound down her arm. She doused her arm to the elbow in the pool.

“What are you gonna do? That fire stuff's not so scary in the water,” Mordecai said.

It took concentration to release a measured burst of heat, like with her hair drying trick, but to burn as hot as she could...that was easy. With barely a thought, Lilith super-heated her skin. The water boiled around her, and steam filled the air with a long, loud hiss. She closed her eyes and let the warmth run out of her fingertips.

“...Lil?”

The heat dissipated quickly in the water, but the wall of steam remained. Lilith could hear Mordecai splashing toward her. When his shadowy silhouette appeared through the steam, she splashed him and darted away. He sputtered.

“Lil! That's not funny."

But Mordecai's voice betrayed his grin, and Lilith slunk around to splash him from the other side. He sloshed a wave of lukewarm water back at her with the sweep of one arm, but she was long gone, and she double palmed a spray across the side of his head. He staggered after her for awhile, missing by a mile with every retaliation. The sounds of their laughter and splashing echoed through the cavern.

"Gotcha!" Mordecai's hand darted out of the steam, grabbed Lilith's shoulder and pulled her forward. She stumbled into his arms. His fingers laced together behind her back, holding her close. The grin he cast down at her was all white teeth and bright, laughing eyes against brown skin. Lilith felt her heart bow in half under the weight of that look. "Now what, siren?" he asked. "You gonna sing me to a watery grave?"

"I'm not that kind of siren," she said, feeling disconnected from her own voice. Their proximity dawned on her. She and Mordecai embraced alone in a deep, dense fog. And they _were_ embracing: his arms wrapped around her, and hers having snaked automatically around his back, too, bypassing any permission she might have denied. She found herself intensely aware of the slim space between them. If she stood up on her toes...if he bent down, just a few inches...

Mordecai's eyes darted over her, studying her bare shoulders and breasts with poorly disguised interest. Lilith flushed but didn't shy away.

“Cut it out,” she said. She'd meant to sound firm, but her voice came out in a whisper.

Mordecai's smile remained, but softened. He regarded her with an expression of near wonderment. Then he did lean down, just a little- not enough for their lips to meet.

A sound broke the spell, a barely perceptible clunk from somewhere by the shore. Mordecai's eyes fluttered open, and he released Lilith as though she'd burned him. She stumbled back a step.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

Lilith retreated into the steam to hide her disappointment, scolding herself for being so stupid. It was wrong to be disappointed, wrong to hope he'd kiss her. She didn't want to tear her best friends' relationship apart from both sides. Still, her stampeding heart seemed so loud that Mordecai might track her by the sound of it, and that familiar, nearly painful flutter filled her stomach.

She felt her way to the shore. Already she'd forgotten about the sound, but she came across the source as she climbed out of the lake. A bottle floated in the water. It had come to rest against shore, and the gentle current drove it against the stone. It sounded each impact with a glassy klink.

Lilith lifted it out and bit down on the cork that sealed the neck, yanking it free with a jerk of her head. Mordecai emerged from the steam behind her.

"What's it say?" he asked.

It took a bit of fishing to extract the note, but it was mercifully undamaged by the water. Lilith read the riddle aloud. “If you'd been thinking with this poor bastard's head instead of your own, you wouldn't be all the way out here.” She frowned. “What's that mean?”

“The skull,” Mordecai said, after a short pause.

“What skull?”

“In Hammerlock's lodge. I bet the fourth clue is in that thing's skull.”

The paper clutched between Lilith's hands trembled, then went up in a belch of flame.


	7. Last Leg

They found the clue exactly where Mordecai had guessed, in the skull suspended over Hammerlock's reading nook. Lilith wondered how she could have missed the bottle when she'd been staring right at it. She tried to remember if she'd seen a glimpse of glass hanging within that shadowed cavity, an oily catch of light from the eye sockets, but it was no use wondering. They couldn't take back the leg of the journey that they'd already traveled.

The riddle was bottled with a postcard. The glossy photograph on the card showed another skeleton, topped with a skull like the one they retrieved the clue from. This one appeared massive, photographed from ground level, and it leaned against a stone pillar with both arms wrapped around, as though it were trying to wrench the boulder from the earth.

'Poor bastard. What would his mother think?' the clue read.

Lilith remembered the skeleton from a brochure she'd seen about the Grotto. The thing was a tourist attraction in a place called Candlerakk Crag, an hour long drive from the Lodge and a walk of a few more. Fanboats couldn't traverse the curved roads that cut tracks up the steep canyons.

When they swung over the sides of the fanboat, leaving it rocking and creaking in the bog behind them, it had just begun to rain. The first spattering against Lilith's scalp prompted her to look up at the bloated bellies of storm clouds. A drop landed directly in her eye, and she wiped it away.

Lilith and Mordecai didn't talk much for the first thirty minutes of the hike. The paths steepened and narrowed as they went, allowing them just enough room to walk single file where the cliffs crowded together. The rocky overhangs afforded some shelter from the rain, at least. Mordecai walked a few paces ahead. When he finally spoke, Lilith jolted, startled by the sudden break in silence.

“Why do you think Brick didn't come with us?” he asked.

“Didn't he say he wanted to give me a break? He was going to take care of the Raider stuff while I was gone...” A weary laugh rattled out of Lilith's lungs. “On this _vacation_.”

“Anyone could do that, though. Not anyone, but Axton might have. Or Maya...even Zero, probably. So why'd he want to do it himself?”

“Don't know.”

But she did know. Brick had told her; he needed to think about whether to tell Mordecai about the drunken kiss. It felt like years had passed since that conversation in the bathroom, though, in reality, less than a week had passed since she'd pressed her hand against Brick's palm through the dirty plastic shower pane.

“Do you think...” Mordecai hesitated. “Forget it.”

“What?”

“Has he been talking about anyone? You guys drank together the other day. I thought, maybe he'd tell you if there was someone...someone else. Damnit,” Mordecai growled. “You know what I mean.”

“You think Brick is cheating on you,” Lilith said. It came out breathlessly, barely loud enough to be heard over the shushing rain.

“I don't know for sure, but he was acting weird before we left. What if he's trying to get me out of the way so he can spend time with him?”

“Who?”

“I don't know!” Mordecai slumped against a rain darkened stone. With his back turned, Lilith couldn't read his expression. “I'm trying to keep my shit together, because I'm probably just crazy. But what if I'm not?” He turned to face Lilith. She saw that the maddening grin that he'd worn since they began the trip had finally been exhausted. His lips pressed tight and turned down at the corners, deepening the lines around his mouth. “I don't want to lose him.”

Lilith moved forward like a woman in a dream. She rested a hand on his shoulder. “He loves you.”

“How can you be sure?”

A memory washed over Lilith like a ray of sunshine, and she smiled. “You wanna know why we traded underwear? He wants to buy lingerie to impress you. He's worried you'll leave him for a woman.”

That same light dawned across Mordecai's face, a kind of slow brightening that wasn't quite a smile. “I shouldn't be happy about that.”

“It's flattering, though,” Lilith said. “He wants to keep you.”

Mordecai grunted and turned away, continuing down the path that would eventually take them the skeletal behemoth. “Geez. I was starting to think he was trying to pull a Parent Trap on us.”

“Huh?”

“You know, a Parent Trap. Without all the twin stuff, obviously, but I thought he was putting us in these romantic situations to get us to hook up. Push us together so he could be with some new guy.”

After Lilith didn't respond for a moment, Mordecai glanced back over his shoulder.

“Parent Trap,” he repeated.

“You keep saying that like I should know what it is,” Lilith said.

“I can't believe you've never heard of Parent Trap. It's only the best movie of the twentieth century.”

“I'm not really into the classics.”

Mordecai scoffed and turned away in disgust.

* * *

Any squishy parts that might have once occupied the skull had dried up or decayed with age, leaving the empty cavity Mordecai and Lilith climbed into. They'd worried that scaling the skeleton would cause it to crumble apart, but the ascent had gone smoothly; someone had wired the bones together, to the scree, and fixed the jawbone to the rest of the skull. When they stepped into the long-dead creature’s mouth, the floor remained steady beneath their feet. Rain drummed against the scalp, making a hollow sound.

They found the bottle easily. It hung from the inside of one eye socket, and Mordecai cut it down and twisted the paper from the bottle. Lilith peered at the note over his shoulder.

“Find the heart through the eyes,” Mordecai read. He looked back through the open sockets, past the runoff sloughing down.

Outside, the rain had caused a dense mist to form in the valleys. Swathes of white clung to the cliffs and shrouded the crags. Lone rocks stuck out of the fog like mysterious strangers, harder and harder to see in the distance. The mountain spiraled up through the mist, towering higher than they could see the top of.

“The heart?” Lilith wondered.

“Could be anywhere. I bet it wasn't this foggy when he wrote the clue.”

Lilith looked back at him, at the bottle still clutched in his hand. Through the rainbow slick of dim, refracted thunderstorm light, she glimpsed a shadowy shape within the glass. She took the bottle from Mordecai and tipped it over, shaking a second roll of paper into her cupped palm.

“Good catch,” Mordecai said.

The paper was a map. It matched their HUD maps of Candlerakk Crag, but Brick had scrawled over it in pencil, carbon copy smutches that were difficult to make out against the bolder, printed lines. The penciled marks didn't seem to correspond to anything on the HUD.

“Shortcuts,” Lilith guessed.

* * *

 “ _Shortcuts_ ,” Mordecai said, spitting as though the word tasted vile. The rest he spoke in a mock female voice: in Lilith's voice, specifically. “Uncharted trails, and maybe this circle is the heart. Maybe if we follow the lines-”

“Oh, shut up!” Lilith snapped. “How the hell was I supposed to know? You agreed with me, remember?”

Mordecai didn't have an argument for that. He grunted and continued to scoot on his butt down the slick, steep embankment, one hand braced against the cliff-face for balance. His scarf had come unknotted and dragged in a tattered tail behind him, and his jeans had been flayed open by scylon stingers in several places. Where the fabric hung in tatters, Lilith saw the shiny red welts beneath, his skin swollen by venom.

The lines Brick had scribbled were not trails. In fact, they seemed to correspond with nothing at all. Trying to follow them up steep slopes and down into crumbling valleys of rock had gotten them nowhere. Not nowhere, exactly, but into a scylon nest, where they'd fought for their life against ceaseless swarms of the armored creatures.

Lilith could still see their tails snapping lightning fast toward her face, toward her arms which she raised to block the blows. Her palms stung when she groped the stone to ease herself down the slope.

“Sorry,” Lilith said, but the word came out in a snap as aggressive as the sclyon's stingers.

“Let's not talk,” Mordecai said. “Look for shelter.”

The rain had picked up pace while they were fumbling up the mountainside. Soon, they could barely see a few yards through the deluge. The water sloughing down the rocks made them slippery. Mordecai, still scooting my increments, slipped, and Lilith shot an arm out to catch him. Her fingers curled around his collar and clenched tight, but his weight was too much, and his inexorable slide pulled her off her ass. They both bumped down the mountainside.

A bed of vines waited at the bottom, and they dropped harmlessly into a furrow of leaves the size of their heads. A cabbagey, damp smell surrounded them, a garden after rain smell. Lilith laughed with relief.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Uh. It's a good thing we're soaked anyway, because I think I pissed myself.”

Lilith found her feet in the tangle of vegetation. They'd slid into a cavern, half often to the sky and half underground. A tunnel sloped deeper into the earth and curved out of sight. Mercifully, no scylons scuttled out of the darkness to attack them. They seemed to have stumbled into a suitable shelter.

“Our packs,” Lilith remembered.

Mordecai dug them out of the thicket and lifted them for her to see. Her shoulders slumped with relief. If they couldn't find a way out right away, they would need the provisions. They helped each other stagger out of the undergrowth and into the dry cavern.

* * *

“I've never picked my nose and licked my finger,” Lilith said.

Mordecai slammed back a shot but glared at Lilith over the rim of the glass. “You're lying. Everyone's done that.”

“I haven't! I'm a girl.”

“You're _Lilith._ ”

“Right. Lilith, the siren. A girl.”

A belch was Mordecai's only reply, one which he waved toward her. She woofed and covered her nose. “Ugh!”

“What do you expect? I'm a boy. Hey, I've _seen_ you pick your nose and eat what you dug out. New rule. If you're caught in a lie, you've gotta drink.”

They huddled around the flickering lantern light in only their underwear, having stripped out of their tattered clothes to treat their wounds. The shiny red knots had sunken into low, barely noticeable mounds after the application of Doc Zed's salve. That shit had stung as bad at the stingers. Lilith had applied it the backs of Mordecai's thighs while he swore at her, and he'd treated her shoulders at the expense of a few first-degree burns. That had been an hour ago, but now they were pleasantly buzzed off the booze that Brick had considerately packed.

Mordecai finished refreshing his shot and plunked the bottle back down between them.

“Alright. My turn. Hm...I've never...” His face lit up. The golden glow from the lantern cast stark shadows across his face, lending a sinister quality to his grin. “I've never picked _my_ nose and licked my finger.”

“Nope. You drank when I asked you earlier, which means you've done it, which means you're lying. Drink again.”

“Shit.” Mordecai swilled the shot and wiped his mouth with the back of one narrow wrist. He sat with his knees pulled up and bowed out, bent over with his forearms braced on his knees. The ladder of his ribs was clearly delineated, his belly concave to the point of concern, but stacked with the faint shadow of muscle. Lilith found herself wondering how those sharp angles would feel against her lips, and whether Mordecai would be tickled into a wriggle if she kissed the hollow just beneath his ribs.

She realized that he'd finished re-pouring his shot, and pretended that she'd been considering her next move.

“Okay. I got one. I've never kissed a bird on the mouth.”

“Ha! Birds don't have mouths. They have beaks.”

“Don't be an asshole. You know what I meant.”

The triumph drained out of Mordecai's face. “It's not weird. It would be weird if I kissed her on the back or belly or something. If you do that, you can accidentally arouse a bird, but kissing the face is pretty safe-”

“Enough. I don't need to hear your bird sexcapades.”

“It's not...”

Lilith glared at him.

He sighed and knocked back the shot he'd only just poured. “You're trying to get me drunk,” Mordecai grumbled. “Trying to lower my inhibitions.”

That was close enough to the truth that it sent a shiver through Lilith. She hadn't thought about that, exactly, but she had suggested the game, and alcohol had loosened hers and Brick's inhibitions before. It made her wonder if some part of her had coldly schemed this. Another shudder rippled across her frame.

“Cold?”

“No. It's your turn.”

Mordecai twisted the tip of his beard thoughtfully. “I've never jerked off with someone sleeping in the same room. Oh, uh...or, flicked the bean, in your case.” He grinned that sharp, white, predatory grin.

All the blood in Lilith's body rushed to her face. A welt that marked a scylon's lucky strike to her cheek throbbed. “You're-” _You're lying,_ she nearly said, but caught herself. If she said that, he would knew she'd heard him. He would know she hadn't stopped him, but had laid in the dark and listened. Her mouth worked soundlessly. Mordecai laughed.

“Drink,” he ordered.

“How are you so sure I've done it?”

“I...I guessed. You look guilty, 's all.”

The gears in Lilith head turned, turned and turned. They clicked. “You heard me.”

“Wh-huh? Nah, I didn't...I never...”

“Don't bullshit me. Last night, in the cave.” She looked him straight in the eye and downed a shot- her first in three rounds. “But you lied, too.”

She nodded toward his glass. He swallowed dry, then swallowed his own shot in one swig, still not breaking the lock of their eyes. It was Lilith's turn. Her fingers shook as she reached out to pour another shot.

“I...” She shook her head. “Did you want to kiss me, in the pool?”

“You didn't say 'I never'.”

“Since it's just us, we're really just asking each other questions, right? Drink for yes, do nothing for no. It's not even a game. Just...drinking and asking stuff. So, answer the question. Did you want to kiss me?”

Mordecai looked down, his forehead creased with thought. Then, in one smooth movement, he refilled his glass and downed it.

He looked up. “Did you want me to?” he asked. “Would you have kissed me back?”

Lilith turned the shot glass between her hands, running the pad of her thumb nervously along the rim. “I don't want to fuck anything up. You and Brick are my best friends, and I-”

“Drink for yes,” Mordecai reminded. “Don't for no.”

After a heartbeat of hesitation, Lilith drank. Mordecai snorted.

“I knew it. You've been sticking your butt out like a skag in heat this whole trip.”

“I hate you,” Lilith moaned, covering her blush with one hand.

“Liar. Drink again.”

But she didn't, and he didn't insist. She peeked over her fingers and studied Mordecai's face: his brown skin turned tawny by the firelight, the rings of paler skin around his eyes where his goggles kept him from tanning. Twin flashes of white, eyetooth and damaged eye, and the appreciative way he returned her stare, his gaze roving down her body.

His gaze stopped on her chest. The conversation had caused Lilith's nipples to harden into nubs beneath her bra, and chills rippled the slopes of her breasts. She crossed her arms over herself self-consciously. Mordecai got to his knees and crawled forward, grabbed her wrist and forced her arm aside.

“ _Excuse me,_ ” Lilith said. “I know I said I would have kissed you, but that's not an invitation to-”

“It's your marks. Your siren marks are the same ones on the map.”

They were. Lilith hadn't realized it before because she hadn't been expecting that, but she'd seen those marks every time she'd looked in the mirror for her entire life, and had studied the scrawl on the map long enough to know they would match.

“I can't believe I didn't see it,” she said, reaching into the pack beside her to retrieve the papers.

Mordecai took the map from her and held it up to compare. The hand that wasn't holding that paper came to rest on Lilith's shoulder, a thumb pressed against the blue spirals. The touch to her bare skin sent a delicious shiver through her.

“That's where we started. The Lodge would be somewhere past here. We went down...about here...” Mordecai chewed his lip with a sharp tooth and tracked their progress across Lilith's body with his fingertips, over her collarbone, pausing just above her breast. "I think the scylons were about here.”

“What's it mean, though? Where do we go?” Lilith asked. Before Mordecai could answer, she realized. “My heart.”

The hand which rested on her sternum drifted down to trace the marks, stroking along the loops and whirls. Mordecai's fingers brushed her skin until they found the spot just over her heart. Lilith tried to keep her breathing even, but surely he could feel the way her pulse thundered out of control, hammering so hard that Lilith felt like she would shatter. But if he noticed, he didn't say. He thumbed circles over her skin.

“I'm surprised Brick remembered your tattoos enough to draw them. There's a blank spot where your bra would be, though. I wondered about that.” Mordecai chuckled.

Lilith grabbed his wrist and lifted his hand away from her breast. His mouth dropped open. “Oh, shit. Sorry,” he said. “I wasn't thinking.”

“I know,” Lilith said, and shot him a less-than-convincing smile. The cave seemed too small, suddenly, too hot and close. She hurried to her feet and into rest of her clothes, listening to Mordecai do the same behind her.

They wouldn't be able to leave the way they'd come in. The vegetation was too thick and weedy to climb through, the cliffs too sheer to climb. Their only option was to go deeper into the cave. They tossed the capped bottle back into their packs along with the glasses, swung them over their shoulders and set off, Mordecai splitting the shadows with the lantern held out in front of them.

The tunnel took them deeper into the earth. After awhile, the grade changed, and the path began to lead back to the surface. Crystal formations bristled from the limestone walls, purple and blue urchins that caught the lamplight and shone like pale stars in the dark. Neither of them spoke until the cave began to lighten subtly.

“Daylight,” Mordecai said. “We must be almost out.”

Soon, the tunnel broadened, and they emerged onto a ledge. The slope below them rolled out an angle they would be able to scale. For a moment, they only stared at the landscape stretched before them. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the sun shone through the parted clouds, so rays of light hung like sheets suspended from the thunderheads. The lone 'V' of a bird soared against the gray and gold sky.

The fog had thinned out into a softening veil of mist, leaving the valley beneath visible, the huts and effigies clinging to the sheer cliffs where tribes lived, the nests of birds and burrows of scylons or skags. They could see everything from their perch above the mountains- nearly everything. Lilith's hand drifted up to her heart, the marks now covered by her shirt.

“It should be past that ridge,” she said, pointing. “That's where it ends.”


	8. Prize

Lilith and Mordecai picked their way between scrubby trees and low, dense bushes as they descended the slope. The day was warm and silent and wet, and the only sound was loose stones skittering under their boots. They stumbled through a copse of bare trees at the base of the mountain and emerged onto a trail.

Up ahead, Lilith could see the path diverge and cut its way through the cliffs, but not for awhile yet. For now, they walked along an avenue so broad that half a dozen others could have walked beside them without jostling. Birds began to twitter from the yellow scrub as the clouds vacated the sky.

"So...this is it," Mordecai said. "Last clue."

He sounded like he expected something, but Lilith didn't know what he wanted her to say. "You excited to head home?"

"A little. This was nice, though."

Lilith snorted. "You don't have to say that."

"It's true! Why do you think I've been grinning like an asshole this whole time? It's not because I like swamp-ass and swarms of bugs. Listen..." He trailed off, and Lilith glanced over at him. Mordecai stared ahead, eyes fixed on some invisible point. "I know you're in charge of the Raiders now, and that keeps you really busy. Which is fine! It's gotta be done. But sometimes...you know...I miss you. It was nice hanging out with you again."

"Oh." Lilith wanted to say more, but an unexpected welt of emotion had swollen her throat shut. She worried that if she tried to force words past it, they'd come out incomprehensible, or worse, transformed into a sob.

"What about you? You excited to get back to civilization?" Mordecai asked.

"Nah," she managed, and swallowed down that lump, and blinked back tears that had snuck into the corners of her eyes. "Well. I'm looking forward to a shower."

"That's the first thing I'm gonna do when we get home. Oh, yeah, dibs on the first shower. Then I'm gonna take a nap, and when I wake up, we're gonna use up that whole bottle of lube. You left it in the pack, right?"

Lilith didn't even hear the question. Despite the cool breeze lifting her hair, sweat prickled her forehead. "We...?"

"Me and Brick," Mordecai said.

"Oh, God. Obviously. I knew that,"  Lilith moaned, hiding her blush in the crook of an elbow. Still, she caught the gleam of Mordecai's sharp, teasing eyetooth out of the corner of her eye.

"You thought I meant you and me. Or, all three of us? Huh. I wouldn't hate that."

"You're joking."

"Of course. Unless you're into it."

Lilith chewed her lip. "Brick wouldn't...would he?"

Mordecai's mouth opened and close mutely for a moment. "We're really talking about this?" he finally asked.

"Why not?"

"Uh, well. He might want to. I don't know." His gaze darted back to her briefly, his expression masked behind his goggles. "You'd really...? With me?"

Lilith smirked and shrugged, folding her arms across her chest. "We'll see. Take me out to dinner first, though. I might need some convincing."

"This trip doesn't count as a date? I mean, I'd say it was a pretty good one. You let me get to second base."

"Hey!"

Lilith had been just about to say the same, but it wasn't her exclamation that rang out against the deliriously bright and silent day. The voice was deep, male, and had come from somewhere in the crags above them. Both Lilith and Mordecai looked up. Brick leaned over the cliff to look down at them. He stood on a trail, probably one that split away from their own higher up the slope. Although he was far above, he grinned wide enough that Lilith could see it.

"You guys were hard to find!" he yelled.

"Hope we didn't inconvenience you," Mordecai's voice dripped with sarcasm, but Brick didn't seem to notice. He shook his head.

"Nah! It's cool! Hey, Mordy. Listen. I changed my mind. I don't want you to do it!"

Lilith gave Mordecai a curious look, and he shrugged. "Do what?" he called back.

"I mean, if ya already did, it's okay. I ain't gonna be mad or nothin. But I just got thinkin about it, and I can't... I couldn't-"

"Brick! Would you shut up for a second? I don't know what you're talking about," Mordecai shouted, hands cupped around his mouth.

"It's...I...Hang on. Let's meet up."

Before they could respond, Brick disappeared back over the ledge, sending a few tiny rocks skittering down the slope. They rolled to a stop against Lilith's shoes. When she turned to Mordecai, he'd already taken off, sprinting up the trail and around the first bend, vanishing from view behind a ridge. Lilith huffed a hard, exasperated sigh and tore after him.

The trail diverged ahead, leaving Lilith to wonder which way Mordecai had gone. She picked the left route. A short way ahead, the path narrowed and became crowded by scraggly bushes and boulders, which she picked through until the way became impassable. She slipped into phasewalk and scouted onward. After a few yards, the path cleared and opened out onto a ledge overlooking the slope.

She surveyed the crisscross of trails below her through the purple veil that separated the universes. Mordecai stood on a higher path, Brick on the next one down; Lilith guessed that they'd accidentally passed each other. She was about to step out of phase when Brick called up to Mordecai.

"I kissed Lilith, and I'm sorry! So, so, so sorry. It was an accident, and I shouldn't have done it, and I shouldn't have tried to get you to kiss her, too. I just thought...if you did it too, then you couldn't be mad at me."

She froze in phasewalk, listening. Their voices sounded warped, flattened by their passage through the membrane between worlds.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Mordecai called back.

"I know. I know it was dumb. And I'm probably too late, but I couldn't sit around thinkin about it no more. I had to come."

"What if you are too late? What if your stupid plan worked too well, and I kissed Lilith, and we fell in love?"

Brick didn't reply, only stared dumbly from the base of the hill- a dog who'd been cruelly struck by his master. But then Mordecai laughed, a chuckle like an avalanche down the mountainside, a laugh which reached Brick and made him laugh, too.

Mordecai followed that sound down the slope. It was too steep, too perilous, but he scuffed on anyway, barely keeping his feet as he sped downward. He lost his balance toward the bottom and pitched forward, his boots lifting clear of the ground, but Brick stood just below. He caught Mordecai and swung him around. Then, when he'd set him down, covered his face in urgent kisses, until Mordecai wrapped both arms around his neck to pull him in for a longer, deeper meeting of mouths.

"I didn't," Mordecai said against Brick's lips, barely loud enough for Lilith to hear, despite the quietude of the day. "I didn't kiss her."

Lilith retreated back the way she'd come, forging through the bushes in a dimension where there were no branches to snag her jeans or gouge her calves, until she reached the open trail on the other side. There, she left phase in a spectacular spray of fire, then continued down the mountain. The walk seemed further now that she wasn't running. She'd begun to think she'd missed a fork in the trail when she came to the crossroads that had separated her from Mordecai.

She could hear the two men talking from the broader avenue ahead- not clearly enough to make out the words, just their voices, and the sweet, jubilant music of their laughter.

"It was pretty dumb to try an' Parent Trap ya," Brick said, when Lilith was in earshot.

"That is _exactly_ what I said," Mordecai exclaimed. He heard Lilith's footsteps behind him and turned around. "Right, Lil? Didn't I say he was trying to Parent Trap us?"

"Yep," Lilith said.

“She hasn't seen Parent Trap,” Mordecai said to Brick.

“What! Nah. Who hasn't seen Parent Trap?”

“I know! It's the best movie. Remember that one part, oh man, it was the best scene, where the girls-”

“You don't even gotta say. I know whatcha talkin about,” Brick said.

Brick caught Mordecai by the arm and led him the other way, toward a path that they hadn't noticed before: what looked like a straighter shot up the mountain. Lilith realized that must have been how Brick and Mordecai missed each other when they tried to meet up. She followed a few paces behind, half listening to them chat.

Although Lilith trailed only a short distance behind her friends, she felt like she'd been left miles back- maybe all the way back in the cave, back where she and Mordecai had teased each other over drinks, where he'd explored the slope of her breast with warm, strong fingers. That touch had been a dream. Here, in the daylight, she could see what an idiot she'd been. Brick and Mordecai were in love. It was plain from the unconscious way they touched, from the ease of their conversation.

Even if they did what she and Mordecai had talked about...even if they asked Brick, and he agreed to--To what, exactly? Lilith wondered. To a threesome?--they would still be a them, and she, a her. She would still be an outsider.

“Hey, Lil,” Mordecai said. He'd stopped. In her distraction, Lilith nearly plowed into him.

“Huh? What?”

“When we get home, we're having a movie night. Parent Trap. Don't try to argue.”

“I...”

“We ain't takin no for an answer,” Brick insisted.

She didn't want to say no, anyway. That sweet, painful lump filled her throat again, and she swallowed it back before they could notice. "Cool," she said. "That sounds cool."

Brick and Mordecai parted to let her slip between them, and they hooked their elbows through hers. Up ahead, the path was just wide enough to accommodate the three friends walking side by side, as though the canyon had been carved just for them.

* * *

When they reached the end of the trail, it opened out onto a plateau. A meadow sprawled before them. Water cascaded down the higher reaches of the mountain, cut across the meadow and spilled out of sight. The mist as the base of the waterfall was shot through by rainbows.

A campsite had been erected in the shelter of the bluffs. It looked, to Lilith, like a scene out of a catalog- the tent taut and immaculate in its construction, the campfire neat and burning low, providing heat to a whistling kettle. Logs had been arranged around the fire for people to sit. Only one figure perched on a log, a hunched, well-dressed man who looked up when he heard the friends amble into the meadow. Hammerlock's bushy mustache curved around his grin.

"Good show, old sports! You're a day ahead of schedule!"

"Really?" Mordecai asked. "That's a surprise. We got lost."

The old hunter cleared his throat and stood up from the boulder where he'd been sitting. “Ah, well, that's to be expected. The riddles couldn't have been very clear.”

Brick scowled. “Hey!”

“I'm sorry, chap, but I told you. Some of them were quite vague.”

“I worked hard on those...”

“So, what are we doing here?” Mordecai said. “No offense, but it's been a long trip. Is there actually a prize to this scavenger hunt?”

“Of course. Don't let my blathering keep us any longer.”

Hammerlock wore a pair of binoculars on a strap around his neck. He lifted them over his head and tried to hand them to Mordecai, but he waved him away. Instead, he pressed a button to digistruct his sniper rifle. A shimmering mirage of a gun appeared in the air between Mordecai's hands. A second later, the outline turned real and solid and dropped into the sniper's waiting grip.

Hammerlock nodded and gestured for Mordecai to follow him to the edge of the plateau. He obeyed, but Lilith and Brick hung back. Their eyes met. In spite of the sweet songs of birds from the bluffs and the green, grassy smells of the meadow, Lilith felt suddenly claustrophobic.

“You told him,” she said.

“Yeah. I thought if you guys went to all these romantic places, you'd end up kissin, too, and Mordecai wouldn't be mad at me. I thought it'd be okay, but...” Brick looked away, over to where Mordecai stood by the cliff. His attention was raptly fixed on something, his back ramrod straight. He looked as thin as a child next to Hammerlock's stodgier frame. When Brick turned back to Lilith, his eyes were dark with emotion. "I was jealous."

“I know. I heard you."

Brick leaned over, elbows propped on his knees, his head bowed. “I mean, I woulda been jealous of both of you. Who's to say you'd have stopped at kissin, huh? I only got the one little peck. That ain't fair.”

"Do you think..." Lilith's tongue darted out, wetting lips that were suddenly bone dry. "Do you think you'd still be jealous, if you were around?"

"Whaddya mean?"

"You know. If Mordecai and I kissed, or...even if we didn't stop at kissing...but you were watching us? Or if we were kissing you, too? Taking turns." That last phrase conjured up images far more vulgar than swapping kisses, and Lilith felt her face flush.

"I donno," Brick said, an uncanny echo of Mordecai's guess. "I guess I'd have to do it to find out. Why you askin?"

Lilith gave him a look that she hoped was pointed, but probably came off more flustered. But, after a moment, a light turned on behind Brick's eyes. His mouth dropped open.

"Oh! Oh. That'd be...yeah, I think...sure. Wait. Are you asking what I think you're asking?"

Lilith felt the skin-crawling sensation of being watched. She looked around and caught Mordecai staring back at her. They'd dawdled too long.

"We'll talk later. Okay?"

Without giving Brick time to reply, she hurried across the meadow toward where Hammerlock and Mordecai still stood on the plateau's precipice. The view was breathtaking: Sweeping arcs of gold and green stone, valleys full of purple shadow. By now, then sun had cut completely through the mist, leaving the mountainside to gleam in the daylight like a multi-faceted jewel.

Mordecai seemed not to be ogling at the scenery, but searching for something, his mouth turned down in concentration.

“What're you looking at?” Lilith asked.

He ignored her, raised the sniper rifle and stared intently through the scope. When he did speak, it to question Hammerlock. “There? By the...the...Oh.”

Hammerlock's mustache twitched, betraying the curve up his lips beneath it. “You see her, then?”

“Yeah. A trash feeder. What's it matter, though? She's full grown. Nobody can train a bird that old.”

“Look again.”

Mordecai scrunched his nose and peered back down the scope. Lilith tried to see what they were talking about, but she couldn't even spot the bird, much less anything else. She knew Mordecai had seen whatever it was, though, when he took a startled step backwards.

“A nest,” he gasped. “You found a nest.”

“Indeed. They're usually quite impossible to locate, but for a tracker of my caliber-” Hammerlock's preening was interrupted by Brick's elbow jabbed into his side. “Oomph. I'd be amiss if I didn't mention, it was actually Brick who stumbled on it. Quite by accident.”

“I was runnin from these big damn bugs! They were stabbin me with their tails, pinchin me with these giant...pincher thingies. Nearly turned them eggs into an omelet before I noticed 'em,” Brick boasted.

“Scylons,” Hammerlock said.

"Nah, an omelette. That's like, eggs, you know? Cos' I almost stepped on them."

"No...I didn't mean..." Hammerlock muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

Mordecai ignored their bickering. He'd lowered the rifle, but his gaze remained fixed on a spot in the bluffs opposite. Following his gaze, Lilith thought she could the nest, too: a brown ring wedged into the space between two rocks, distant and impossible to see from anywhere but the ledge where they stood. Three white specks—eggs, she guessed—sat in nest.

Brick touched the his shoulder, startling him out of his trance. Mordecai looked up at him.

“I know it ain't gonna be the same. Blood was a kick-ass bird, and there ain't nothing can take her place." Brick's other hand drifted up, absently, to clutch the paws hanging from his necklace. "But there are other places. In here," he said, tapping one thick index finger against Mordecai's chest. "Room for another bird."

"I...I don't know."

"C'mon, think about it. Don't you miss that bird shit smell? And getting bit awake every morning? All that awful crap, you always loved it. All we gotta do is hop down there, swipe an egg, and you can have that again."

This time, Mordecai didn't argue, but nodded mutely and twined a narrow arm around Brick's massive one. He rested his forehead against the taller man's shoulder, just for a second. Then he untangled himself from their brief embrace.

“Okay,” he said, casting one last glace down the slope. “Let's get us an egg.”

 


	9. Mistake

Movie night was delayed. The three friends had gotten home exhausted, covered in cuts and bruises, and Mordecai still had to set up a suitable nest under a heating bulb for the egg. When he'd finally finished, Lilith and Brick were already in bed and asleep. Lilith had been roused, briefly, by Mordecai dropping into the heap.

The next morning, she woke to find everyone gone. Dawn poked tendrils of light through the window, painting the bedroom pink. It was rare for the start of a Pandoran day cycle to coincide with the rising sun. Lilith spent a moment in silent appreciation of the phenomenon. Then the television blared from the living room, audience laughter through a crackle of static, and she reluctantly climbed out of bed.

Lilith found Brick reclined across the couch, shirtless, boxers askew. His snored slightly, and she realized that he'd fallen back to sleep. She took in the sight of his bare chest and long, muscular body for a few seconds longer.

"Morning," she said, startling him awake. She was wearing barely more than him--boy cut underwear and a tanktop--so when she yawned and lifted her arms to stretch, air chilled her belly where the shirt rode up. She could feel Brick's gaze on her exposed skin.

"Mornin'," he mumbled, after too long a pause.

"Coffee?"

"Pot's broken."

Lilith crossed the room to the couch. Brick sat up to give her space, and she flopped down beside him, slumping against his shoulder. His skin smelled good, a clean smell, and she remembered hearing the shower's hiss from the twilight of sleep.

"I should shower," she mused. "My pits stink."

"Stay. You're fine."

Before Brick sat up, he'd had a blanket bunched under his head as a pillow. Now he took it by the corners and swept over both of them. Lilith hadn't noticed the morning chill until the blanket warmed her bare legs, and she snuggled closer to Brick with a hum.

"Mordecai's out," he said. "He went to get some bird stuff."

The television audience found that hilarious, apparently, because they burst into gales of laughter. Lilith didn't recognize the show. Some sitcom, she guessed, from the canned reactions to lukewarm jokes. Brick had stopped watching, anyway. Lilith caught him looking at her from the corner of her eye.

Her gaze remained fixed on the television, but she didn't watch the program, either. Brick had wrested her full attention. The warm nakedness of his body made her pulse trip-trap in her wrists. Where did he say Mordecai was? Lilith couldn't remember, except for the first part. He was Out.

"You saw Mordecai before he left?" she asked.

"Yeah. We took a shower together."

"Did he ask you about anything?"

"Don't think so. Well, he asked me not to drink from his stash no more, but he didn't really ask. More like told. S'at what you mean?"

"Did you ask _him_ anything, then?" Lilith cleared her throat. "You know, about what we talked about?"

"Crap. I forgot."

Lilith sighed. She probably should have let it go, but her proximity to Brick had her stomach twisting and fluttering. Every time he shifted against her, a hot cord of desire unfurled down her spine. She couldn't think of anything else.

"I was going to let him bring it up, but Mordecai and I talked about it, too. He wanted to ask if you'd be up for all three of us fucking around."

"Fucking around?" Brick said, his lip quirking in amusement. "What's that mean, exactly?"

"We didn't go into it. But I think...sex."

"Oh."

They went on pretending to watch the show for awhile longer. When Lilith felt a touch against her thigh, she jolted. Brick's fingers ghosted over her skin, lingered, then became firmer, his palm sliding up her thigh. He glanced at Lilith from under lowered lids. As usual, Lilith easily read his expression.

 _Is this okay?_ his gaze seemed to ask.

"No," she said, although she immediately regretted it. "We have to talk to Mordecai first."

Brick withdrew his hand and slumped back against the arm of the couch. "Man," he sulked. "This sucks."

He looked like a pouting child, his arms folded across his chest and slouching into the cushions, with an aura of such petulant disappointment that Lilith couldn't help but find him adorable. She stifled a laugh behind her fingers. Despite her better instincts, she didn't want to disappoint him, and, more selfishly, didn't want to let the moment fizzle out.

"I've got an idea," she said. "It's kind of a loophole. Even though Mordecai and I never kissed, we had, uh...tension. Some stuff happened."

"Stuff?" Brick said, with the slimmest shadow of unhappiness in his voice. "What kinda stuff?"

"We didn't have sex or anything. But, like...okay. When we were figuring out your last clue, he followed my siren marks with his fingers, all the way down to my, uh, boob region."

At first Lilith thought Brick _was_ going to be mad, from the way his eyebrows knotted together and the look of dark concentration that clouded his face. Then the look lifted, and the sun came out behind his eyes. "So if I touched your boob, it'd be okay!"

This time, Lilith couldn't hold back a giggle. Brick's excitement was too funny, too pure and sweet. "That's the idea."

"What else did you do?"

"Hm...We skinny dipped in the caverns. But obviously we can't do that."

Brick jumped up, startling her. She fell back across the cushions.

"Let's shower," he said.

"That..." Doubt tugged at Lilith. Technically, that wouldn't be much different--she and Mordecai had been naked together, had _held_ each other, too--but...how did the saying go? Two wrongs don't mind a right? But Brick was still staring at her, waiting for her answer and biting his bottom lip in anticipation, and Lilith thought it might have been sexiest thing she'd ever seen.

"That sounds good," she finished. "Only fair, right?"

Brick pumped a fist in silent celebration, then extended the same hand down to Lilith. She took it, and he pulled her up off her feet. She stumbled into him. When he caught her, she felt the hardness of his chest and stomach. She cleared her throat and extracted herself from his arms.

"Come on," she said, retrieving his hand and leading him back to the bedroom, toward the adjacent bathroom.

When they got into the bedroom, though, Brick pulled away. "Hold on. I gotta do somethin." He went over to the nest of old clothing and blankets that Mordecai had slung together the night before and knelt down. A cream colored, brown speckled egg the size of Brick's fist was cradled in the makeshift nest, and he laid a hand on it.

"Hey. I donno if you can hear me, or if you're pickin up any of this, but I just wanna say...No matter what it looks like, I'm gonna be your other daddy. You're gonna come outta there, and you ain't gonna bite me or nothin. Cos' we're family. Okay?"

The egg didn't reply, but Brick remained on his knees for a moment longer. Then he stood up and rejoined Lilith by the bathroom door.

"Bloodwing hated me," he explained. "I don't want this one to hate me too."

"It wont. Bloodwing didn't know you as a chick, but you're going to be the second thing this bird sees when it comes out of that egg. Mordecai will be its mommy, you'll be its daddy, and I'll be fun aunt Lilith."

Brick snorted. "That's ridiculous, Lil."

Lilith didn't remind him that he'd just been having a conversation with an egg, but ushered him into the bathroom instead, then closed the door behind them. They seemed to leave their easy mood and conversation outside, and the door's soft click unfurled a curtain of quiet reverence around them.

"So," Brick said, shifting a little closer in the already close quarters. He rested a hand on Lilith's shoulder and worked a thumb under the strap of her tanktop. "Did you and Mordy undress each other?"

"Hate to say it, but no."

They'd been in the same space, though, so she didn't insist that Brick turn away when she crossed her arms around her middle and lifted her shirt up over her head. She wore nothing underneath and felt immediately exposed under the pitiless florescent lights. Still, she wriggled out of her shorts, too, and stood naked in the bathroom.

"Huh. The curtains match the drapes."

"Alright, no commentary. Your turn," she said, and tugged teasingly at his boxers.

Brick chuffed a laugh and hooked his thumbs into the waistband, then pulled them down quick. A sideways step left him as naked as her.

He let her wriggle past to turn on the water. She knew he was looking at her ass and the cleft between her legs when she bent to adjust the settings, but she said nothing, and stepped into the spray after it warmed up. Brick sidled in after her. The fit was tight in the small shower. They stood a bare inch apart. Every inhalation, every swell of chest and stomach threatened to press them together.

"Where'd he touch you?" Brick asked, leaning forward to murmur it in her ear. "Where'd you touch him?"

His fingers brushed her waist, her hips, hovering: waiting her permission to grab and hold.

"He wrapped his arms around me...we were chasing each other in the steam, and he caught me," she explained.

Brick wasted no time. His hands came to rest on her hips and slid around to her back, then down, to cup her butt. Lilith snorted against his chest. "Not there."

"Worth a try," he said.

He released her butt and gripped his own wrists behind her back, in an unconscious mirroring of Mordecai in the pool. Her arms snaked automatically around his peculiarly narrow waist. He fit there perfectly, and she found herself wondering if Mordecai also felt this way with Brick: like pieces of a puzzle made to interlock.

"Is this bad?" she murmured into Brick's skin, tasting the water that ran in lukewarm rivulets down his chest. "Are we bad people?"

"Don't ask me. One time, I clubbed a midget to death with another midget. 'm pretty sure I'm goin to Hell. But you?" Brick chuckled into her ear, a low, gravelly rumble that sent shivers down Lilith's spine. "Yeah, probly the same. That's okay. We'll meet up down there."

Lilith hadn't noticed, but at some point they'd begun to sway slightly, as though slow dancing to the beat of their own hearts.

"Mordecai thinks you're gay," Lilith said, a bit of trivia suddenly remembered. "He said you wouldn't touch a vagina with someone else's dick."

"What do you think?" Brick teased, punctuating the question with a firm kiss against her neck. A hateful inner voice reminded her that Mordecai hadn't done _that_ , but she pushed the thought aside. "So? Do you think I'm gay?" Brick reiterated.

"No."

The evidence was a hardness pressed between them, radiating warmth that seemed to catch and light in the place that Mordecai claimed Brick would never touch 'with someone else's dick'. Lilith shifted her thighs together and tried to remember what else she and Mordecai had done together.

"Like I said before, he touched my breast," she said. No 'boob region' now. They were past that.

When Brick unlocked his wrists, Lilith took his hand and guided it. The calloused pad of his thumb traced tracks down her skin, exploring the area which Mordecai had already mapped, then continuing into uncharted territory. He thumbed her nipple, making her hiss.

"Can't," she said, before pale slivers of pleasure could slice away her restraint.

"This game's got too many rules," Brick complained, but obediently returned to safer ground. "I wanna touch you. I wanna be with you."

"We should wait for Mordecai." The argument sounded flat in her own ears. They already hadn't waited. If they'd waited, they wouldn't be here, embracing beneath a spray of already cooling water.

"You an' Mordy must have done somethin else, right? Anything else?"

"No, we..." But they had done one more thing, which Lilith suddenly remembered. "Oh."

"Oh? I like the sound of that."

"There's something. When we camped out at the first site- you know, the cave between the old man's hands?"

A doggish, delighted grin spread over Brick's face. "Yeah! You got that one? Cos the trees looked like hands. Hey, did you like my clues? Hammerlock said-"

"Brick."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. What were you sayin?"

"There was only the one bed, since it was supposed to be you and him, and we ended up sharing it. Nothing happened. I mean, he fell asleep right away, so there wasn't any weird stuff, but I couldn't sleep, so...I..." she swallowed. Brick stared at her expectantly. She could tell he had no idea where she was going with this, and had to take a steadying breath to get the rest out. "I masturbated."

"Whoah."

"Don't judge me, okay? I thought he was asleep."

"You thought?"

"He told me later that he was awake. And, uh...he did it, too. When I was done, I heard him wake up and...you know. At least, I thought he'd just woken up."

For the second time, Lilith thought Brick was going to be mad, and for the second time, he surprised her. His thoughtfully pursed lips relaxed into a smile.

"So, we can...?"

Lilith nodded, tickling Brick's chest with her wet hair.

Brick reached down to turn off the spray. It was just as well; the water had turned cold, the heat run dry by his and Mordecai's earlier shower, then by this one. They went bare and unashamed into the bedroom, where Brick pulled her down into the bed, just as he had when he'd first carried her home from the Raider Headquarters. This time, he made no insistence that she sleep.

"You sure it's okay?" he asked.

"Don't ask me that!" Lilith said through a belt of laughter. "I'm not even sure the rest was okay. I want this, though."

They started on their backs but soon rolled onto their sides, to bump their foreheads together and look down at each other's bodies. Lilith understood what Mordecai had meant, now; Brick was a grower, not a shower. What had been modestly sized in the shower had lengthened dramatically. The distance which Brick stroked from base to tip was at least eight inches, in her estimation.

Herself, she turned fingers in between her legs and rocked back and forth, grinding against them. It wasn't the easiest position. She'd have liked to turn onto her belly, or to get the vibrator she kept in the top drawer back at her apartment, but there was no chance of that. The moment was a soap bubble, hallucinatory and beautiful, but just as easily shattered. And although her position wasn't optimal, the view more than made it up. The sight of themselves--of Brick's hand working over his own length and hers curled between her thighs--filled Lilith with live wires, sparking and spitting.

"Fuck," he breathed. "Lil..."

The front door slammed in the other room. They both froze, eyes wide.

"Hey! Guess what I got? Skag pellets! That sounds like pellets for skags, but they're actually pellets made out of chopped up skags. They're for the bird, when she hatches."

Mordecai's voice grew louder as he moved through the apartment. In her initial panic, Lilith hadn't know what to do, but years of practice now kicked in. A million enemies closing in had trained her instincts. She phased and climbed over Brick, leaving him alone, naked, and still achingly erect. She hurried across the room to the bathroom door and hid in plain sight. There, she watched Mordecai walk in with an armload of purchases.

"I got this tree thing. I think Blood would have loved one of these, but I didn't know about...whoah." He peered at Brick over the leaning tower of boxes. "You waiting for me?"

"Uh..."

"You're all wet. Did you shower again?"

"I wanted to be clean for ya," Brick said, but only after a long, lip-gnawing hesitation.

Mordecai set the boxes by the door and stood with hands on hips, regarding the naked brute stretched out on his bed. If his expression showed suspicion, it was impossible for Lilith to tell through his goggles. But when he pushed them up and untangled the strap from his dreads, she saw nothing but admiration in the good eye and something like greed in the bad.

"Damn, _mi rey._ What'd I do to deserve this?"

The flicker of pain that crossed Brick's expression was evident to Lilith, but Mordecai missed it. He climbed into the bed beside his boyfriend. Brick took him into his arms-- _puzzle pieces,_ Lilith thought again-- and they kissed. Not to make-out, but to share a brief, comfortable peck. That somehow made Lilith feel even more voyeuristic: as though she was sneaking a peek at more than bare bodies, but at their bared hearts.

"I see you're ready for me," Mordecai hummed into the crook of Brick's neck, his hand drifting down to Brick's erection. "Want me to shower first? The caravan I bought that shit from was pretty ripe. I don't want to be-"

"I'm sorry! I can't. I wasn't waitin' for you."

Mordecai had been trailing kisses down Brick's neck, but now he stopped. "Uh, okay? You were just jerking off?"

"Kinda..."

Lilith sighed and retreated into the bathroom. If she had to confess, they didn't have to know she'd also been eavesdropping, too. She stepped back through the veil with minimal elemental discharge, so only a short strobe of light marked her return. When she was firmly back in this universe, she emerged into the bedroom, still naked, arms wrapped self-consciously around herself.

"Sorry," she muttered.

"You...? Wha...I..." Mordecai gawped. "You were gonna screw around in front of the egg? That's disgusting!"

"Seriously?"

"It's like a baby. You were going to fuck in front of a baby!"

"Actually, since it's not hatched yet, it's pretty much like doing it with a pregnant woman, when you think about it," Lilith said, not sure why they were arguing about this instead of the more obvious issue.

"That's also gross." Mordecai wrinkled his nose. "And I can't believe you didn't talk to me first. You're assholes."

"I know. I know, an' I'm sorry," Brick said. He tried to nuzzle Mordecai's neck, but Mordecai shoved him away. "Lil told me how you talked about, like, maybe doin a threesome sometime."

"A threesome. _Three_ being the operative word."

Lilith came over to perch awkwardly on the edge of the bed. "We should have waited."

"Damn right. Did you...do it, already?"

"No," Lilith said hurriedly. "We weren't really going to, exactly. There were rules." Rules that seemed stupid now, hardly worth the breath it would take to explain them, but Mordecai's hurt expression compelled her to try. "We couldn't do anything that you and I hadn't already done on the trip."

"Oh, huh, that's funny," he barked. "I don't remember taking a shower with you and getting into bed and, and, and whatever else you were gonna do."

"Well, we did skinny dip in the springs. And Brick and I were just going to touch ourselves, like we did in the cave." Lilith wasn't sure why she continued to argue, when she herself was unconvinced.

"That was nothing like this! I didn't even get to see you." As soon as the words slipped out of his mouth, Mordecai looked like he regretted them. A blush quickly darkened his cheeks, pinker around his eyes were his skin was more pale. "It was dark."

Lilith chewed the inside of her cheek. This was crazy. She'd been caught screwing around with her best friend's boyfriend and now she was debating the specifics with him.

"It's not dark now," she pointed out. "We could...if you wanted to."

"No! No way. I've gotta go."

Mordecai struggled upright and scooted around Lilith, clearly trying not to touch her. She had forgotten that she was still naked, and felt deeply embarrassed, suddenly, and stupid and scared.

"Wait! I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...can't we..."

But Mordecai had already slipped out of the bedroom. The front door slammed a moment later. The wide-eyed looks that Lilith and Brick exchanged in the wake of that hard, angry clap were perfect reflections of their expressions earlier, from the last time they'd looked to each other in horror after hearing the door bang shut.

 


	10. Firsts

By the time Lilith's molecules finished knitting back together, she was drenched. A torrential downpour hid the Highland's rolling fields. Rain fell in such dense, slanted sheets that Lilith couldn't see the town of Overlook sticking up over the next ridge.

She was an island: herself, the Fast Travel station, and a sign that read: 'Invisibl Assholes!', marooned in an ocean on rain. Mordecai had already gone.

Lilith wondered if he'd seen the storm and decided to travel somewhere else, but then she remembered the Zaford bar up the hill. He would be there. Brick had guessed it-- _he don't go to Moxxi's no more, and I'm pretty sure he's gonna need a drink_ \--and Lilith had agreed with him. He'd also said to give Mordecai time to cool off, but she hadn't agreed about that part.

She headed blindly in the direction of the bar. She might have stepped into the mouth of a bullymong, for all the wetness and the deafening roar of the rain. Worse; something predatory lurked out there. The storm masked its movements, but Lilith could feel it watching her. Her skin broke out in a rash of gooseflesh.

The hunting thing was close. For a second, Lilith caught a glimpse of it through the rain. A pins-and-needles itch engulfed her palms, igniting twin balls of fire. Whatever the thing was, it darted off before she could get a look at it. She took advantage of its retreat to double time up the slope.

She sensed it again, closer, this time, and threw up flaming arms to defend herself. The thing struck. It slashed her arm, caught on fire and went scurrying away. Lilith saw the blazing outline of it long enough to recognize it as a stalker before the rain extinguished the flames.

From somewhere in the sea of rain came a cry. Not a stalker, but a man's voice, shouting something incomprehensible, followed by a gunshot. Lilith recognized the thunderous clap of the Orion. The man cried out again-- _Mordecai_ , she realized--and she lunged forward, searching for him in the storm.

She could hear them, now; a pack of stalkers, circling. Another darted forward, slashed her leg twice before she could kick it away.

"Fuck this," she said, and slipped into phasewalk.

In the other dimension, she could see the grass tamped flat by the deluge, and the dozen stalkers skulking in the shadows of crags. Mordecai stood a ways further up the slope, spread stanced, sniper rifle raised. He squeezed off a shot. The round plunged harmlessly into the grass.

A striker snapped darts from its tail toward Mordecai, too far for Lilith to do anything. She called out; "Hey!"

The word emerged strange, distorted by the void. Mordecai whirled toward her. Too late; the darts stuck in his arm, made him snarl and stagger back. He fired a shot toward the source of the sound--toward Lilith--and the bullet plugged the ground by her feet.

Bullets fired from phasewalk couldn't touch the stalkers, but if she emerged, she'd be blinded again by the rain. She shook with frustration. Mordecai raised wounded arm, bit down on the stingers and ripped them out with his teeth. He spat them into the grass. What he did next, Lilith didn't understand.

He stood still, head bowed, rifle slack at his side. For several long seconds, he might have been a statue. Even the stalkers seemed confused by his resignation. They circled, waiting to see what the hunter would do.

Mordecai's spell of stillness broke. He raised his rifle, aimed and shot. The first stalker hit the dirt. One thunder crack after another, they fell, their legs and vestigial glider flaps waving helplessly. Some tried to flee, or to strike, but Mordecai was too fast. The battle was quick and strangely bloodless.

After all the hunters had been dispatched, Mordecai's gaze rested on Lilith. She prickled. He couldn't possibly see her. The stalkers, even while shielded, had displaced the rain, and Mordecai could have spotted them that way. This was different. Lilith stood in another dimension, one where no rain fell to betray her position.

"I know you're out there," Mordecai declared.

Lilith was suddenly afraid to show herself. She knew Mordecai wouldn't hurt her, even when angry, but something about the way he'd been so still and centered, and the dispassionate way he'd sniped the entire pack of stalkers...she thought about his eye, that predatory glare hidden by his goggles, and shivered.

He took a hesitant step forward, and Lilith could tell that sharpness had gone. She crossed the field in several smooth strides, until she stood in front of Mordecai, close enough to see his nostrils flare and his eyes darting behind the nearly opaque lenses of his goggles. He looked nervous. In the world between worlds, everything glowed, faintly luminescent and gauzy, quivering with purple light.

All the light and color and clarity fell away as Lilith slipped out of phase. The shushing rain rushed back into her ears at full volume. The landscape vanished and was replaced by shifting silver curtains. She and Mordecai stood alone, isolated in the storm.

"I knew it," he said.

"Yeah? I bet I can guess how," Lilith said. Mordecai looked confused, so she went on. "There's a sign back there that says 'invisible assholes'. Well? Here I am."

Like she'd hoped, Mordecai cracked a smile. Almost as soon as it appeared, though, it twisted into a scowl.

"You shouldn't have followed me."

"Do you want me to leave?"

Mordecai shifted and looked away, out at the endless abyss of rain. After a hesitation, he shook his head. "No. Do you wanna get a drink?"

"Absolutely. I figured you were going to the Zaford bar."

"I came here to snipe. I like picking off Hyperion goons out in the last outposts. It clears my head. But, doesn't look like that's going to happen today." Mordecai turned and started uphill, in the direction of Overlook.

Lilith followed, careful to keep her footing in the slick grass and mud. "You did really well against those stalkers."

Mordecai grunted and said nothing. After awhile, Lilith couldn't stand the silence.

"You could see them?"

"Of course. I can see really good with this eye, but it...I get headaches. I don't want to talk about it. _You_ should be the one talking."

"What do you want me to say? That I'm sorry? You know I am."

"Doesn't sound like it."

"I apologized! I don't know what else--Oomph!"

Lilith slipped, distracted by their argument, and landed on her side. She rolled a short distance down the sopping wet slope before grabbing two fistfuls of grass to stop herself. Barely audible over the storm, Mordecai laughed. Lilith looked up. A gloved hand was already there, reaching down to her. She took it and was dragged to her feet.

"Come on. You wanted a date, right?"

"Are you serious?"

"Sure. I still like you. It's not even that I don't want you and Brick to fool around. I just wanted to be there for it."

Lilith wanted to reply, but they'd arrived at the bar. The building loomed unexpectedly out of the rain. Mordecai turned the handle and leaned into it, forcing the heavy door open, and they hurried inside. The door thunked behind them, shutting out the cold and the rain. Inside, the pub was warm and light, and the pleasantly acrid smell of beer filled their senses.

Barely anybody took notice of the newcomers. They bent over their drinks or continued their noisy conversations, kept pulling the arms of slot machine and plugging darts into the general vicinity of boards. Only the barkeep looked up. He waved Mordecai over with an exclamation too slurred and accented for Lilith to understand.

"Two," Mordecai said, pulling out a stool for Lilith and dropping into his own.

The bartender crowed as if he'd said something hilarious, retrieved two mugs from under the counter and filled them at the tap. He plunked them down in front of Mordecai and Lilith, then shuffled off to serve someone further down the bar.

"So. This is our first date," Lilith said. "You couldn't have taken me somewhere nicer?"

Mordecai scoffed and took a sip from his beer. "This is the nicest bar on Pandora. Much better than Moxxi's shithole."

"Sounds like sour grapes to me."

Even with the goggles obscuring his face, Lilith could feel Mordecai glaring at her. "Anyone ever tell you that you're a rotten date?"

"What? No way."

"Oh, sure, okay. Guys love it when you ridicule the places they take you and accuse them of being bitter about their ex-girlfriends. And sleeping with their boyfriends behind their back, that's a great move. Guys _really_ like that."

"You're still mad," Lilith said.

"Do you even want to be here? I mean, if you're only after Brick, just tell me. Get it over with."

"No!" Lilith cried, louder than she'd meant to. Several heads turned in their direction. "You really think that?"

"What the hell am I supposed to think? He only sent us on that trip because you guys kissed, and as soon as we get back...as soon as I left..." Mordecai drowned whatever else he'd meant to say with a swig of beer.

Lilith walked her fingers across the bartop. Her hand bumped Mordecai's, her pinky curled over his. "I'm attracted to Brick," she admitted. "We were dumb...we made a mistake. But I like you, too."

"Then how come you didn't make a mistake with me? I'm just as dumb as Brick." Mordecai frowned, and corrected; "Almost as dumb as Brick."

"I would have. I wanted to. In the cavern, I really wanted you to kiss me."

Mordecai had been chugging his beer, and now he banged his mug down on the counter. Lilith jumped.

"I can fix that. It's late, but if you still want that kiss, it's only fair."

Although she couldn't say why, Lilith blinked and cowered. "You want to kiss me? _Here?_ "

More and more people had begun to take notice of their conversation. The patrons sniggered at Mordecai's offer to make amends, and more, Lilith suspected, at the reddening of her cheeks. Mordecai seemed to consider her question, twisting his beard thoughtfully before he replied.

"Nah, not here. These guys'll never let me forget it."

The ambient sniggering turned into full blown laughter, as if to confirm his suspicion. The absurdity of it made Lilith feel like she was back in high school. The hallways would be buzzing about this. _That drunk sniper, you know, Mordecai? I hear he's got bitches on both arms._

"Let me take you home," Mordecai offered. His gaze drifted to her untouched mug, and he frowned. "You didn't finish your beer. That's alright, we can stay-"

"I'd like to go," Lilith said hurriedly. "Uhm. Please."

For the first time since he'd walked in on her and Brick, Mordecai grinned wide enough to reveal that sharp, white tooth. "When we get back, are you gonna invite me in?"

"I haven't decided. It wouldn't hurt your chances if you paid the tab, though," Lilith teased, sidling off the stool.

Mordecai met the barkeep's eyes. "It's on me."

The barkeep whooped and said something that Lilith couldn't understand. Whatever it was, it made a blush creep over Mordecai's face. He grumbled and slid off his stool, too, then wrapped an arm around Lilith on their way out. They went through the rain that way, arms crossed behind each other's waists, like drunkards stumbling out of a bar and braced together for balance. It was half true. They'd just left a bar, but they were mostly sober, intoxicated only by one another's nearness.

Any remaining stalkers must have been warned off by the corpses of their companions, because Lilith and Mordecai arrived unharmed and sopping wet at the Fast Travel. They quickly punched the code for Sanctuary and made the jaunt in seconds. Once there, Lilith half expected Mordecai to walk her to her apartment. She hadn't been back home since the day after Brick had carried her to his bed. Even then, she'd only stayed long enough to throw some clothes and essentials into a bag.

They went right past her old stoop. Soon, Mordecai's street--her street, too, it seemed--came into view. They rounded the corner, crowding together around the bend. It could almost have been an alleyway, that little road, but instead of claustrophobic, it felt cozy to Lilith. The street was sleepy, silent and snowy, lit only by the sunlight which slanted through the narrow span between buildings. They crunched down the road in comfortable silence. At some point Lilith had slipped her fingers into Mordecai's, and they held hands the rest of the way. She felt almost disappointed when they arrived at the doorstep.

Then Mordecai looked down at her, and her disappointment fled. Her heart bumped hard, once, twice. Tan arms wrapped around her waist, and Mordecai's wrists locked against the small of her back, just like they had when they'd started this business.

"So?" he asked. "Did I make a good impression?"

She pretended to think about it. "I liked how you killed all those stalkers. That was pretty kick-ass."

"And I paid for the drinks," he reminded her.

"Sure. For a beer I didn't drink, but sure," she said. He looked genuinely worried, so she grinned coyly up at him. "I had a nice time."

It was the permission he'd been waiting for. Mordecai bent forward, and Lilith stood up to meet him. They kissed inexpertly, and she smiled against his lips, as though the clumsiness was just a part of their courtship game. They tried again. This time, Mordecai pulled her close, his other hand drifting up to tangle in her wet hair. There was no need to play this one off as a joke, or a tease. Lilith would never say so--it was too trite, too disgustingly cliche--but later, much later, while contractions twisted her like a rag, she'd pinpoint that first kiss as the moment she fell in love with Mordecai.

When they parted, they stared at each other for a breathless few seconds.

"Do you wanna come in?" Moredecai asked. "I know it's forward, asking you in after the first date, but I think we've got a real connection. Plus..." There it was again: that sharp, cutting eyetooth. "I get the feeling you're easy."

Lilith tried to huff, but she could only laugh, and when Mordecai held the door open for her, she stepped inside.


	11. Take your Lumps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So rough! I haven't written in so long! :') Sorry for the mess.

Brick stood in the snow, hands outstretched on either side. “Go on. Hit me.”

The three friends had gathered just outside Sanctuary. The sun was sinking over the city, forcing Lilith and Mordecai into the wall's deep shadow, one which didn't quite reach Brick. He glowed in the sunlight where he stood a few yards away.

“Is that what you dragged me out here for?” Mordecai growled, hands stuffed in his pockets, hunched against the cold. His breath turned to steam as it puffed out of his mouth. A chilly wind picked up, lifting loose snow from the ground and scattering it over their boots. Lilith crunched from one foot to the other, watching the scene with amusement.

“I feel bad,” Brick said.

“So?”

“So, I want you to get even with me. Just hit me as hard as you can, okay? Right in the face.”

Mordecai scowled. “I'm not going to hit you. I'd feel like an asshole, hitting a guy who's just letting me do it. That would be like shooting a caged Borok.” After the last part, his scowl curled into a small, sneaky smile.

“What?” Brick said, suddenly suspicious.

“Are you wearing your shield?”

Brick tapped the black face of his shield set into red and white molded plastic. Three glowing bars signified that the shield was at full charge. When Lilith looked, she could see the faint hexagons of energy refracting light around Brick.

“Good. I don't want to kill you,” Mordecai said, and shrugged off the strap of his sniper rifle, swinging it around into his grip. As he hefted the stock up to his shoulder, Brick swallowed and took a step back.

“Really, Mordy? Even with a shield-”

“It'll hurt. I know. Probably more than a punch to your fat head, right?”

“Well...yeah.”

“Maybe that's how bad you hurt me, huh? You ever think of that?”

With a sigh and a slump, Brick hung his head. His shoulders rolled in a shrug of resignation. “Fine. Go ahead.”

Mordecai shot a sideways grin to Lilith, and she guessed he was winking beneath his goggles. Without a beat of hesitation, he raised the rifle and pulled the trigger, delivering a round straight to Brick's middle. Lilith saw the metal slug spark off the energy shield and land, hissing and steaming, in the snow a few feet away. Brick woofed and staggered back.

“Nice shot,” he wheezed.

Mordecai seemed unconvinced. He frowned, and when Brick straightened up, he shot again. The second round caught Brick square in the chest. The force knocked him backward into the snow, where he fell straight back like a log. His shield bleeped a low charge alert.

With cool indifference, Mordecai slung the sniper rifle back over his shoulder and crossed the distance to Brick with several long-legged strides. He stopped over the other man's prone, groaning form, then dropped to his knees to straddle his waist.

“You said...one shot...” Brick groaned.

“No, I didn't.”

Brick considered, eyes darting from side to side, searching his memory. “No,” he admitted. “You didn't.”

Lilith trailed behind Mordecai, arms crossed over her chest and a smirk playing across her lips. “Okay, boys. Kiss and make up.”

Mordecai did kiss Brick, then, just a soft grazing of lips, but Brick glared past him, eyes locked on Lilith.

“What?” she asked, frowning as she echoed Brick's suspicious question from earlier.

“How come you ain't getting shot?”

She didn't know the answer to that, and she only gaped for a moment, mouth moving soundlessly. “Uhm...well...”

“I think you oughta shoot her, Mordy. Fair's fair.”

“Come on, man,” Lilith said, a hint of a whine in her voice. “Be a buddy.”

Mordecai loosed a raspy, boozy chuckle and stood up out of his boyfriend's lap. He offered Brick a hand, and the larger man took it, cringing as he struggled to his feet.

“Well, Lil? You wearing your shield?” Mordecai asked.

Unfortunately, she had clipped the damn thing to her belt before they left the house, assuming any mysterious errand Brick led them into would probably involve combat.

“No,” she lied, twisting to hide the shield readout's glow from view.

Brick grabbed her arm and turned her around, revealing the hidden equipment. “Hah!” he barked, the cruel delight in his voice making his grinning, split lip seem especially like a sneer. “Take your lumps.”

“Fine. But don't expect to get any of these lumps ever again. By these lumps, I mean, you know...my, uh...You get the idea!” she snapped and stalked off. When she was sure she'd put enough distance between herself and Mordecai so the bullet wouldn't strip her shield off completely and punch through her chest, she stopped and whirled around to face them.

It didn't surprise her to see that Brick hadn't waited by his master but had loped after her, grinning and practically bouncing up and down with anticipation. She slapped him away.

“Get out of here! Sheesh!”

Mordecai took aim with the same cool precision with which he targeted Brick. Looking down the blackness of the barrel made Lilith feel strange. Her scalp prickled and her ears drew back as the skin on the nape of her neck bunched.

“Go on, then,” she yelled. “Get it over with!”

But when she saw Mordecai's finger tighten around the trigger, instinct kicked in. She winked out existence as the rifle barked. The bullet spun toward her, flashing in the sunlight, and passed harmlessly through the spot where she had been standing.

Lilith heard the air whumph out of Brick's lungs, whirled around and saw him doubled over. His shield, which had mercifully recharged between poundings, shrilled again. Lilith burst out of phase with a silent boom.

“Sorry. I flinched.”

“Damnit, Lil,” Brick wheezed and collapsed to his knees, clutching his bruised abdomen.

Mordecai laughed as he strode over to him. “That's what sour grapes gets you.”

“You're the one holding a smoking gun,” Brick pointed out, but couldn't help but grin into the folds of Mordecai's shirt when he got close enough to brace against. “Dickhead.”

By now the sun was beginning to set over the walls of Sanctuary. They walked home in deepening shadow, Lilith and Brick trading playful punches behind Mordecai's back, facing their grins away from each other so not to give any satisfaction. Once, on turning back toward Brick, Lilith caught him wincing.

“How're your ribs?” she asked.

“They hurt,” he said, glaring pointedly at Lilith.

She huffed, guilty but too prideful to apologize. Especially when he'd thrown her under the proverbial bus. “Don't be a baby. Mordecai will kiss it better for you.”

Mordecai walked ahead of them, and he cast a look back over his shoulder. “Will I?”

“That's a boyfriend's job,” Lilith said.

“True. But since it's partly your fault, don't you think you'd better help?”

“What, like with first aid? I think I have a stim pack somewhere-”

“With the kissing, I mean,” Mordecai clarified. Brick snorted with surprise, an explosive outburst that made him wince and clutch his ribs again.

“Oh,” Lilith said breathlessly. “ _Oh!_ ”

 


	12. Night

Night found the three friends in bed, drawn tightly together in defense against the biting cold. Wind howled mournfully across the roof and the pipes groaned in the walls. Fingers of frost clawed at the window. Snowflakes battered the pane with their small, soft bodies, piling up along the sill. Bright florescent light from the open bathroom door bathed the bedroom in silver.

Despite the roaring storm outside, silence swaddled the bed's occupants. The two men had their arms crossed around Lilith. Mordecai's lips pressed against her forehead, while Brick's chin rested on the top of her head. Their breath gently ruffled her hair.

“Some buildings have heating again,” Lilith said, breaking the long silence between them. She heard Brick's breath hitch, and realized he must have fallen asleep. “I can ask Scooter to hook something up for you.”

“Didn't you talk to him about it already, babe?” Mordecai asked “What'd he say?”

A sleepy grunt was Brick's only reply, and a hand which crept around to slide in between Mordecai and Lilith's bodies and slip into the cup of her bra. They all had stripped down to their underwear before crawling into bed. Lilith had assumed—as they all had, she guessed—that the sexual tension would boil over on its own, once they got into the same place and on the same page. But...

“Did I fall asleep?” Brick said, finally seeming to shake off his doze.

“It's not your fault,” Lilith admitted. “Nobody made a move.”

Mordecai shifted, his beard tickling Lilith's nose. “It's just...weird, isn't it? It's... _you._ ”

“Me? You're blaming me?” Lilith asked, blinking. She tried to draw away from Mordecai, but Brick's immovable frame enfolded her from behind.

“I don't mean it like that. You're _Lilith_ , is what I mean.”

She scoffed, unable to believe what she was hearing. Wasn't this the same man who'd chased her through the springs, shouting and laughing, as full hearted as children? Who'd held her in the steam and barely been able to let go? Wasn't this the same man who'd taken her breath away with a kiss on the stoop, their hair wet and freezing and thawed by the heat between them?

“So, what? What are you saying?” she asked, unable to squash the irritation spiking in her tone. “That you don't want to do this anymore?”

“No! Not that. Can you just...make the first move? Or something,” Mordecai muttered.

A low, sleepy laugh rumbled from over Lilith's shoulder. Brick hadn't released hold of Lilith's breast during their conversation, but had begun to knead, fingers firmly cupping and playing over the soft flesh. “Dummies,” he grunted, scooting down the bed to kiss her neck. She couldn't see his face, but she imagined him locking eyes with Mordecai while his lips roved over her skin, and the thought sent a pleasant tingle through her. “You gonna talk this thing to death?”

“Maybe it's just because I'm looking at you. Can we turn the lights off?” Mordecai asked.

“ _Excuse me?”_ Lilith asked. The tingle evaporated at once. “So you want to fuck me, but only if you don't have to look at me?”

“Right! Exactly.”

“Mordy, that's messed up,” Brick said.

“I didn't mean..! God. What a bouquet of delicate flowers. I think it's just because I've just seen you bossing me around too much, making fun of me for missing shots, that kind of stuff. Friend stuff. It's too weird, seeing you like this.”

“You and Brick were friends before you got together,” Lilith pointed out, trying to keep the bite out of her voice. “How did you get over it?”

Both men considered this quietly for a moment. Brick remembered first. “He was dumb back then, too. Kept telling me to shut up when I tried to talk romance-y.”

“Mordecai!” Lilith scolded.

“It was weird,” Mordecai insisted. “It was _Brick._ ”

“It's me, it's Brick. Is there anyone you can comfortably screw?”

Like an answer to Mordecai's prayers, the wind's voice rose to nearly a shriek. Then the bathroom light flared out, plunging the room into darkness. Lilith couldn't see the man only a few inches from her face. Now the wind quieted to a moan again. It hadn't bothered her before, but now the mournful sound made Lilith's hairs stand up and drove her to snuggle tighter against Mordecai's gaunt chest. Brick wriggled up to her, too, closing the gap. His body was warm and hard and reassuring.

“I'm sorry,” Mordecai rasped. His voice was a ghost, scarcely loud enough to be heard over the hooting gales. “I'm an _idiota._ ”

Lilith comforted him with a kiss, at first a blind seeking of lips that found his beard, his jaw and the bridge of his nose, until Mordecai's long fingered hand curled in her hair and guided her. They met in a long, slow simmer, only ending when Brick's knuckles brushed her chin, gently but firmly drawing her away. Bed springs bemoaned their change in position, squalling when Lilith pivoted on an elbow to face Brick.

She lay draped half over his broad chest, kissing him with the languor their first foray had lacked. Mordecai's fingertips traced patterns across her back, then deftly snicked open her bra. The sudden chill of air against bare skin made her gasp.

That night, with the wind screaming like a skag in heat outside their apartment, the three friends barely cracked a decibel. Brick and Mordecai explored Lilith's body with silent wonder, murmuring their appreciation in husky baritones that left her shaking and clinging, opening her mouth wantonly against theirs.

Brick had never been with a woman. He confessed it like a guilty man, his head lowered. Lilith knew it even in the darkness because of the way his buzzed short hair tickled against her neck. She couldn't help but laugh and hug his head, folding him between two warm breasts. She guided him, teaching him where and how to touch her. Mordecai's hands found theirs clasped in the dark and followed them down the slopes of Lilith's body. When Brick's fingers slipped into her, one and eventually another, Mordecai pressed his palm against her groin and the patch of red fur above her mound, feeling the bulge of Brick's fingers inside.

“Nice,” he murmured, half into Lilith's ear and half into Brick's. But to him directly, he added, “Hey, curl your fingers this way a little. Toward mine.”

When he did, pleasure rang Lilith's body like a bell. Her toes splayed and her heart skipped, and she sunk her nails into Brick's muscular shoulders. Mordecai hummed appreciatively. His fingers pressed against Brick's, through that spot that made Lilith's breath come in hard, sharp sucks when Brick rubbed it from the inside.

They did more together that night, but not everything; not yet. Mostly they explored each other with new freedom. In spite of the dark, with no way to gauge hurt feelings, Mordecai and Brick remained in tune with each other. When one became jealous, coiling even slightly into the safety of themselves, the other would lavish him with attention. Lilith could feel the strength of their connection. It made her feel lonely, sometimes. But as soon as she'd begin to feel like a third wheel, the men would sense that, too, or perhaps by coincidence turn their attention back to her.

The blackout prevented any kind of cleaning up or dressing when they grew tired. Instead, the yawning wind lulled them into a doze. They'd been up and down the bed during their rollicking, rolling over each other, but sleep found them the same way they'd started- with Lilith in the middle, bookended on either side by the warmth of her best men.

She woke in even deeper blackness. Brick and Mordecai were still in the bed—she could feel their weight around her—but their bodies had turned cold. Now their presence only chilled her. She tried to move but couldn't even twitch her fingers. Her neck ached. It felt like a steel rod had been shoved through her skull and into her shoulders, staking her to the spot, keeping her from turning her head.

Panic stole over her. Roland would find her here, find her naked with their two best friends, fluids drying on the sheets and on their fingers.

She heard his footsteps in the hall. Why had she done it? She felt sure she hadn't meant to cheat, but that she'd somehow forgotten Roland, forgotten him completely for a moment. The footsteps grew louder, closer. At any moment she would hear him- _Hey, Lil,_ he would say. _You asleep?_ his voice scratched raw by the winds that still raged outside the apartment.

Thrashing, now, but still unable to move, Lilith felt near the point of madness. A stealthy thought crept into her consciousness. Where was she? Not the home in New Haven that she and Roland had shared for that wonderful while, and not the Raider HQ in Sanctuary where they'd crammed into a single cot for a short night's passion, before...

Before...

No voice came from the hall. Her waking had been another dream, which was shattered by the realization. Lilith's eyes fluttered open. The pitch black was replaced by shadows and silver. When she tried to turn her head this time, it obeyed, and her cheek rested against a cool flat of pillow. She looked into the bathroom, where the light had come back on sometime during the night.

In the rectangle of light, someone moved. Mordecai stood in front of the sink. He leaned closer, studying his own face, dreads loose, goggles discarded. Even from the bed, Lilith saw his empty eye reflected in the mirror. At his reflection, Mordecai sniggered. “Still got it, old man,” he congratulated himself, so quietly it wouldn't have woken Lilith if she hadn't already been up. His nose wrinkled in disgust suddenly. His nostrils flared as he sniffed. He raised an arm and sniffed again, bending to whiff his armpits, then recoiled.

Lilith smiled. She closed her eyes and drifted, and eventually fell back asleep to the sounds of Mordecai washing his pits in the bathroom sink.


	13. Labor of Love, Pt. 2

Mordecai leaned over and planted a kiss on Lilith's forehead. His breath wafted over her, miraculously cool against fevered skin.

“Did we really fight that much?” he asked, brows furrowed. “You make it sound like we fight all the time.”

Two hours and a dozen stories had passed between them, mostly told by Lilith. She only paused intermittently to grit her teeth and ride out waves of contractions, endless waves, it seemed, never much closer together. During those times, Brick and Mordecai gripped her hands on either side and distracted her by embellishing the story.

“Hate to break it to ya, Mordy, but we still fight a lot,” Brick said. Not to be outdone, he kissed Lilith's other temple.

“Not as much as she's making it sound like.”

“You're arguing about how much we argue,” Lilith pointed out, a ghost of laughter in her words. Hair stuck to her pallid forehead, and she buried her face in her hands. When she pulled them away, her smile—faint as it was—had gone. “Am I going to squeeze this stupid thing out soon? I'm tired, and I don't know how much longer I can stretch this story out.”

“You ain't even got to the best part! What about Talon, and Stormy, and the thing with the spiderants?” Brick said, crossing his arms indignantly.

“You tell it,” Lilith sighed. Her hands bunched into fists around the sweat soaked sheets and she twisted, rocked by sudden pain. Tears of exhaustion sprang to her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Why do I have to tell it, anyway? I'm the one having a damn baby! You were there. You tell it,” she moaned.

“We'll take over,” Mordecai said. His voice soothed as much as his cool breath had. “What did you want to hear, Brick? About Stormy?”

“And Talon, and the rest of it. But, uh. Not the one part,” Brick said.

“No way. You're not getting off the hook that easy,” Lilith hissed through gritted teeth. She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. “I want to hear it all.”


End file.
